Building a (SOC) is no small or simple task. For many organisations, knowing where to start, what technology to purchase, or even what guidelines to follow can quickly overwhelm. In May of this year, the National Cyber Security Centre released new guidelines to help businesses reevaluate their cybersecurity and start taking actionable steps to increase their security posture.
The guidelines are thorough and helpful, and a lot can be learned from them about determining what’s best for your organisation’s business and security goals.
Two Key Takeaways from NCSC Guidelines
1. Your organisation needs to evaluate critical threats, assets, and resources to determine how you want to build a SOC.
Understanding how your internal resources match up with your threats is crucial for deciding what path to go down with your SOC. Do you want to build it yourself or do you want to partner with a security provider who can deliver it as a service? Many organisations simply can’t afford to build their own SOC in-house. But without one they lack 24/7 monitoring and advanced threat detection, putting their organisation, data, and customers at risk.
2. Building a SOC is a journey, not a destination.
According to the guidelines, “It will take many iterations and a fair amount of investment to design and build a SOC that works for your organisation. You will not have all the answers immediately or be able to pluck an appropriate SOC out of thin air.” Building out a SOC that meets all your organisation’s needs takes time.
Why Arctic Wolf Is the Perfect Partner for Achieving NCSC Guidelines
In the age of skyrocketing ransomware, supply-chain attacks, and evolving phishing schemes, cybersecurity needs to be a top priority. But knowing this and implementing effective, proactive protection are two different beasts.
Every threat is different. Every asset, end point, and access point presents a different level of risk and building a strong security posture is an ongoing process. A SOC that works for your organisation right now may be insufficient in 24 months. Arctic Wolf is equipped to deal with changing threats and unique business environments, and operates as a partner — utilising both service and technology — to help a business reduce their cyber risk.
Here’s how the NCSC guidelines and Arctic Wolf matchup:
Detecting an attack conducted by an “Innovator” level actor is significantly more difficult than an “Expert” level actor, therefore this will have a significant impact on your SOC design.”
- Arctic Wolf defends organisations of all sizes against threat actors of all levels. Adopting a service approach can accelerate time-to-value and raise your target operating model dramatically.
“A SOC must understand what the organisation’s most critical assets are, and the business context in which they operate.”
- The Arctic Wolf Concierge Security® model provides a named team of security engineers to every customer, who takes the time to understand your business, assets, and security objectives and tailors the service appropriately.
“Continual improvement is critical to the success of a SOC, because the environment [businesses] operate in, and the adversaries which they face, are constantly evolving.”
- Continual improvement ensures your defences stay strong and your security posture matures and strengthens over time. Our proactive security operations solutions not only help you detect, respond and recover from advanced threats, but can also help you discover, assess, and harden your environment against digital risks.
“There are multiple ways to perform onboarding, from onboarding common log sources, using the output of risk assessments or just onboarding absolutely every log source available.”
- Arctic Wolf believes broad visibility provides the best defence, because you can’t protect what you can’t see. Our vendor-neutral approach and unlimited data ingestion model ensures full visibility across our customers’ environments.
“The value of threat intelligence depends on your detection approach.”
- At Arctic Wolf, threat intelligence is critical to our service and technologies. Arctic Wolf Labs, our new research-focused division focused on advancing innovation in the field of security operations, brings together Arctic Wolf’s security and threat intelligence researchers, data scientists, and security development engineers with deep domain knowledge in artificial intelligence (AI), security R&D, as well as advanced threat offensive and defensive methods and technologies.
“Not every alert will be an incident. This is why developing a consistent process that enables the SOC to efficiently determine the nature of an alert is vital.”
- Arctic Wolf works with your existing tech stack to immediately begin monitoring your environment, ensuring proactive and dynamic detection and response to threats, intrusions, and attacks. Organisations receive timely and actionable intelligence from an always-available team of expert security analysts — without the overwhelming noise of endless false positives.
Every organisation, regardless of size or security maturity, should read through the NCSC guidelines to better understand evolving threats and where their own business stands in terms of cybersecurity. If your organisation is struggling with resources, cost, or the burden of implementing a SOC that fits your business and cyber needs, Arctic Wolf is always here to help.
Read “A Security Leader’s Guide To Leveraging MDR for Security Maturity and Development” to learn more about how to up your organisation’s security posture. Or, if you know your business needs a partner, reach out to Arctic Wolf.
