SOC environments and roles
The SOC environment is one of the most critical teams that comprises your organization’s security posture. At the same time, there is no true one-size-fits-all for any SOC environment, which is part of the fun when evaluating yours for improvements. So how do you evaluate how your SOC should be set up? Well, that depends on the purpose of your organization. To test that theory, we will discuss a few hypothetical companies and the make-up of a few different SOC teams that I have seen first-hand. We’ll also talk through important traits for any SOC employee and drill down to specific roles.
SOC environments, as mentioned, all look different, but at the core, they are responsible for alert triage and incident response. In some cases, they can also be responsible for red team activities, security engineering, and network monitoring. That means that your basic roles are SOC analysts, incident responders, and SOC managers, but again that changes depending on scope. Expanded SOC environments might have network operations center (NOC) managers, NOC analysts, security engineers, threat intelligence analysts, or red team operators.
The first hypothetical SOC that we will evaluate is for a company called Blair Consulting. Blair Consulting has a SOC that is responsible for the management of security tools for building detections and for tabletop exercises, and they also have a hybrid environment, which means that there is a combination of on-premises systems and cloud systems. A SOC at that company would be comprised of a SOC manager, incident responder, security engineers, a red team specialist or engineer, and a cloud security engineer. The specific number of people would depend on the size of the organization, but as a rule of thumb, I try to have 1 incident responder for every 200–300 employees. That number primarily takes effect after you have a base set of employees for your team, which is done in the scaling-up period. This also changes if you are a public or private company because if you are public, or depending on the types of data your organization has, you might have reporting requirements for incidents, such as reporting to credit card bureaus in the case of a breach that concerns payment card industry data.
As you can see, any environment will require different teams and personnel, and no one environment looks the same. You should base it on the resources your organization has, the risks that have been identified as high and critical for your organization, and the projected growth/scalability of both the team and the organization.
