Summary

To summarize, no two SOCs will ever be the same, and this can be inherently complex at first. Once you break it down and identify the needs of the organization, you will be able to determine what roles are needed and what the minimum size for your SOC is so that you can scale appropriately. Once you have at least some of the roles in place, you must evaluate your coverage so that you can identify your coverage gaps, and what the risks are for your organization. From there, you can remediate those gaps and risks through increased logging, increased detection engineering, or making technical changes. The increase in coverage is typically only accomplished through cross-team collaboration, which also makes the SOC team more efficient and ensures that proper access controls such as the principle of least privilege remain in place.

In the next chapter, we’ll take a deeper look at identifying risks through creating a risk registry, making a test plan, and conducting a purple team exercise, and hear from an industry analyst about common gaps and shortfalls. All of this will involve practical information, which you will be able to implement in your SOC environment to help increase your organization’s security maturity.