To keep up with an ever-changing threat environment, cybersecurity technologies and offerings are continually evolving. It’s essential for managed services providers (MSPs) to ensure you are providing your clients with the best possible protection – not just protecting endpoints or a cloud application. It’s vital that you explain to your clients how Security Operations Center (SOC) as a Service and a managed antivirus offerings differ.
A SOC provides the functions that an enterprise requires to monitor for threats and respond to security incidents. A part of this is what Gartner refers to as “Managed Detection and Response.” On the other hand, SOC as a Service is a managed service, monitoring all security solutions for threats, including network, endpoint, and cloud (IaaS and SaaS). Unlike managed antivirus or managed endpoint detection and response, SOC as a Service monitors the entire environment, including endpoints, network, and cloud.
Another difference is that Security Operations as a Service offerings are typically vendor-agnostic. “SOC as a Service typically also ingests log data from the major endpoint detection and response as well as antivirus tools.” Moreover, SOC as a Service solutions use log data from antivirus and detection and response tools.
Threat Detection via SOC
SOC as a Service leverages the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, which is built on five functions:
- Protect
- Detect
- Respond
- Recover
- Identify
SOC as a Service monitors for threats that slip past other protection measures. The solution also identifies vulnerabilities so businesses and organizations can mitigate them and reduce their attack surface.
Where a managed antivirus or managed endpoint protection and response (MEDR) only look at one dimension (i.e., the endpoint), SOC as a Service is monitoring multiple dimensions, including endpoints, network, IaaS and SaaS, and performing correlations across those dimensions. By ingesting security telemetry from all dimensions of an enterprise’s system and enriching it with threat intelligence, it’s effective at sifting through data to find malicious activity.
SOC as a Service solutions can catch things like suspicious Microsoft 365 logins or activity on other cloud solutions that might give a threat actor access to an endpoint. When the SOC as a Service tool identifies a threat, it notifies the end user to take steps to remediate it. The best solutions minimize false positives to help save time and avoid alert fatigue.
Businesses Recognize the Value of SOC as a Service
With IT talent, particularly IT pros with security skills, in short supply and some IT hardware orders with months-long lead times, businesses are looking for help establishing or expanding their SOCs.
Also, while large enterprises may have on-premises SOCs, medium-sized companies and SMBs are looking for an outsourced solution that’s vendor agnostic and flexible enough to secure hybrid environments. They also need providers’ expertise to comply with regulations like PCI DSS and HIPAA that require monitoring and log retention.
If you’re expanding your portfolio to include a SOC as a Service offering, ensure you can meet those needs as well as provide your clients with the highest degree of security possible.
