Cybersecurity Outsourcing Flaws
Security Operations Centers (or SOCs for short), operations that work 24/7 and give you access to technology and people that are capable of identifying and responding to potential cyber threats to your business, are becoming essential to modern-day cybersecurity.
However, not every business has the budget or capacity to have their own in-house SOCs, nor the kind of talent required to manage them, which is why many smaller to medium businesses opt for outsourced SOCs. Furthermore, with the bolstering age of remote working, it has become difficult to consistently scale up the SOC to match the ever-growing network perimeter of a business.
With all of these difficulties in mind, it is becoming more and more common for businesses to outsource their Security Operations Centers, but there are plenty of other challenges that come with outsourcing, too.
Take a look at just some of the reasons why outsourced SOCs may fail.
Lack of Responsibility and/or Accountability
Many organizations have made the mistake of assuming that an outsourced Security Operations Center is accountable for anything and everything that goes wrong, including any data breaches and functionality of incident responses.
While the SOC is responsible for monitoring your network and security events that may occur within it, you yourself cannot shirk off all accountability and responsibility for how your own organization handles an incident. The only way to fix this problem is to create and maintain a clear understanding of who is responsible for what, and who can be held accountable.
We recommend Cyber Crisis Tabletop Exercises for this, as during the simulated attack scenario, all participants must think about what actions they’ll take and how they’ll respond, helping each department or role clarify what they have to do in the event of an actual crisis.
Why You’re Outsourcing
While you may know that your company has chosen to outsource its Security Operations Center because it saves costs or leads to a higher ROI in the long run, failure can be a result of having a lack of clarity on what you expect to achieve/what the desired outcome of the SOC is.
Experts say that simply defining the metrics and KPIs is not enough; there needs to be a clear vision. One of the ways to help this issue is to create a benefits/outcome statement in terms of the SOC and have it provided to, understood by, and agreed upon by all company stakeholders.
Understaffed Outsourcers and Poor Evaluation
Just like everyone else in the industry, it needs to be understood that SOCs are experiencing the same issues with finding and hiring skilled, talented staff.
When you plan on outsourcing, visit the provider you intend on partnering with and ask to speak with their analysts. You should also consider asking to see the total number of analysts that they have, and ask the SOC to walk you through their experience with real attacks, how they were able to detect them, and what they did to respond to and remediate the event.
If this article has assisted you in understanding the complex, interconnected field of SOCs and a company’s needs, our experts at Arruda Group would be more than happy to further expand your knowledge in the field.
