Asset inventory: A SOC needs to maintain an exhaustive inventory of everything that needs to be protected, inside or outside the data center (for example applications, databases, servers, cloud services, endpoints, etc.) and all the tools used to protect them (firewalls, antivirus/anti-malware/anti-ransomware tools, monitoring software, etc.). Many SOCs will use an asset discovery solution for this task.

Routine maintenance and preparation: To maximize the effectiveness of security tools and measures in place, the SOC performs preventive maintenance such as applying software patches and upgrades, and continually updating firewalls, allowlist and blocklists, and security policies and procedures. The SOC can also create system backups—or assist in creating backup policies or procedures—to ensure business continuity in the event of a data breach, ransomware attack or other cybersecurity incident.

Incident response planning: The SOC is responsible for developing the organization's incident response plan, which defines activities, roles and responsibilities in the event of a threat or incident, and the metrics by which the success of any incident response will be measured.

Regular testing: The SOC team performs vulnerability assessments—comprehensive assessments that identify each resource's vulnerability to potential or emerging threats and the associate costs. It also conducts penetration tests that simulate specific attacks on one or more systems. The team remediates or fine-tunes applications, security policies, best practices and incident response plans based on the results of these tests.

Staying current: The SOC stays up to date on the latest security solutions and technologies, and on the latest threat intelligence—news and information about cyberattacks and the hackers who perpetrate them, gathered from social media, industry sources and the dark web.

Continuous, around-the-clock security monitoring: The SOC monitors the entire extended IT infrastructure—applications, servers, system software, computing devices, cloud workloads, the network—24/7/365 for signs of known exploits and for any suspicious activity.

For many SOCs, the core monitoring, detection and response technology has been security information and event management, or SIEM. SIEM monitors and aggregates alerts and telemetry from software and hardware on the network in real time, and then analyzes the data to identify potential threats. More recently, some SOCs have also adopted extended detection and response (XDR) technology, which provides more detailed telemetry and monitoring, and enables automation of incident detection and response.

Log management: Log management—the collection and analysis of log data generated by every network event—is an important subset of monitoring. While most IT departments collect log data, it's the analysis that establishes normal or baseline activity and reveals anomalies that indicate suspicious activity. In fact, many hackers count on the fact that companies don't always analyze log data, which can allow their viruses and malware to run undetected for weeks or even months on the victim's systems. Most SIEM solutions include log management capability.

Threat detection: The SOC team sorts the signals from the noise—the indications of actual cyberthreats and hacker uses from the false positives—and then triages the threats by severity. Modern SIEM solutions include artificial intelligence (AI) that automates these processes and which 'learns' from the data to get better at spotting suspicious activity over time.

Incident response: In response to a threat or actual incident, the SOC moves to limit the damage. Actions can include:

• Root cause investigation, to determine the technical vulnerabilities that gave hackers access to the system, as well as other factors (such as bad password hygiene or poor enforcement of policies) that contributed to the incident.
• Shutting down compromised endpoints or disconnecting them from the network.
• Isolating compromised areas of the network or rerouting network traffic.
• Pausing or stopping compromised applications or processes.
• Deleting damaged or infected files.
• Running antivirus or anti-malware software.
• Decommissioning passwords for internal and external users.

Many XDR solutions enable SOCs to automate and accelerate these and other incident responses.

Recovery and remediation: Once an incident is contained, the SOC eradicates the threat, then works to recover the impacted assets to their state before the incident (for example wiping, restoring and reconnecting disks, user devices and other endpoints; restoring network traffic; restarting applications and processes). In the event of a data breach or ransomware attack, recovery might also involve cutting over to backup systems, and resetting passwords and authentication credentials.

Post-mortem and refinement: To prevent a recurrence, the SOC uses any new intelligence gained from the incident to better address vulnerabilities, update processes and policies, choose new cybersecurity tools or revise the incident response plan. At a higher level, SOC team might also try to determine whether the incident reveals a new or changing cybersecurity trend for which the team needs to prepare.

Compliance management: It's the SOC's job to ensure all applications, systems and security tools and processes comply with data privacy regulations such as GDPR (Global Data Protection Regulation), CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). Following an incident, the SOC makes sure that users, regulators, law enforcement and other parties are notified in accordance with regulations and that the required incident data is retained for evidence and auditing.