The increasing complexity of the threat landscape and the growing attack surface at many organizations have put a strain on security analysts. These professionals are spending more time than ever triaging, responding to, and remediating alerts, threats, and incidents across their complex hybrid environments. Consequently, they have less time to focus on higher-level projects and participate in training to enhance their skills.
The challenges faced by security analysts cannot be solved by simply adopting new technologies. Adding more point products to address new threats often increases the attack surface and slows down daily operations. Additionally, the ongoing cybersecurity talent shortage makes it difficult to alleviate the burden by increasing headcount in the security operations center (SOC).
Fortunately, there are ways to overcome these hurdles and re-energize analysts without adding new tools or staff members. Outsourcing certain functions to dedicated experts is a critical approach to eliminating noise and optimizing operations. By outsourcing, the internal team can then focus on more strategic tasks to better protect the business.
While some security operations center leaders may see leveraging third-party services as a failure, it is actually a smart move. Many well-staffed SOC teams embrace third-party services for various reasons, such as augmenting their capabilities or gaining a third-party perspective to improve their security programs.
Imagine the strategic priorities that could be pursued if analysts weren’t preoccupied with daily alert monitoring and triaging. Shifting a significant portion of their time from reactionary tasks to proactive ones can yield impressive results. Metrics such as mean-time-to-detect, time to triage and investigate, mean-time-to-respond, and percent of threats responded through automated processes can demonstrate the improved performance of security operations and risk reduction.
Embracing security services can benefit the entire organization by filling resource gaps and maintaining a strong security posture. For example, using a SOC-as-a-service (SOCaaS) provider as an extension of the team allows offloading tasks like non-business hour monitoring. Machine learning trained by highly specialized experts can process large volumes of data, enabling analysts to focus on higher-impact activities.
SOCaaS providers can also help organizations build processes, streamline technologies, and automate common workflows. Automation is often seen as a pipe dream for stretched-too-thin security teams. However, partnering with a SOCaaS provider can facilitate the adoption of automation and the establishment of machine-learning models. This way, the team can minimize the chances of successful attacks and respond faster and more efficiently to incidents.
Another valuable aspect of security services is the outside perspective they bring. Providers can assess SOC operations and help reduce risk through assessments, incident response readiness exercises, tabletop exercises, and playbook development. These activities help optimize the team and processes, ultimately reducing breach costs.
In addition to readiness exercises, organizations can outsource incident response work if a breach occurs. Having a team of experts on standby not only provides peace of mind but also reduces the time required for remediation. Trusted vendors can also assist in creating ongoing cybersecurity education programs for the security team and the entire organization.
Given the rapid changes in the threat landscape and the industry at large, most enterprises and their SOC teams can benefit from third-party services. The ultimate SOC is hybrid, as fully outsourced or fully in-sourced SOCs are not practical for many organizations.
Security analysts today face overwhelming volumes of alerts that need to be triaged and investigated, including false positives. Keeping up with the volume is daunting and unattainable for most organizations. Engaging analysts in higher-level activities like threat hunting can improve their expertise and job satisfaction.
By embracing third-party services, organizations can improve their security posture and achieve goals faster. The existing security processes and technologies can be enhanced and built upon, while analysts can focus on more strategic projects. A tiered or blended security operations approach increases the value of analysts to the organization and keeps them engaged and interested in their roles.
In conclusion, outsourcing certain functions to third-party service providers can relieve the burden on security analysts and optimize operations. It allows analysts to focus on higher-level tasks and participate in training, ultimately improving the organization’s security posture. By embracing security services, organizations can achieve better results, enhance existing processes and technologies, and have the bandwidth to face future threats effectively.