If you have turned to a remote workforce to conduct business since the pandemic began, you know that this comes with many security challenges. Cybersecurity attacks were already increasing, but work-from-home initiatives only expanded opportunities for hackers.
In fact, the FBI has a special list for cybercriminals, their “Cyber’s Most Wanted” list, which has over 70 people and groups named. These criminals have conspired to commit crimes that are extremely damaging to the United States, including wire fraud, identity theft, computer intrusion, theft of trade secrets, and more.
Overall, corporate cyber-attacks increased by 50% recently. Some of the already most targeted industries by hackers saw an enormous increase in cyberattacks, including government (up by 47%), healthcare (up by 71%), and research/education (up by 75%).
If you are worried about the cyber security in your organization, don’t wait until after an attack happens and wreaks havoc to clean up the mess. Having a strong SecOps program protects your company before a data breach, virus, or any other cyber-attack happens.
Now, let’s talk about what SecOps is and how it is making a difference in cyber security for mid-sized and large organizations.
What is SecOps
The term SecOps is really a play on words. SecOps combines a company’s security and the team of information technology operations.
SecOps was born out of a response to chaos and dysfunction between security and IT. This is a lot like how DevOps was when development and IT operated separately. DevOps became a solution to be more cohesive and create better outcomes for businesses.
SecOps is a team of highly skilled professionals that focuses on monitoring and assessing risks. They protect corporate assets. Benefits of SecOps include:
- Around the clock protection
- Collaboration
- Communication
- Compliance
- Decrease in the cost of data breaches
- Fast and effective responses
- Improves the company’s reputation
- Security experts
- Threat prevention
While the benefits of SecOps are overwhelming, the number of cybersecurity workers is not. There is a tremendous talent shortage to the tune of 2.72 million roles based on ISC2 Cyber Workforce Study, which is why employers are working hard to find a needle in a haystack. Once they find them, employers are looking for a creative solution to motivate and keep them.
One way to keep your amazing SecOps talent is working to make sure they have proper onboarding and, after that, ensure that their efforts will translate to increased value for your organization.
How to Implement SecOps
First, provide SecOps training. You can create your own training, you can find a third party to help you, or create a hybrid of both. No matter what you choose, your organization needs experts to conduct training.
The SecOps team must fully understand their own role while being able to work well in a team. They must know how security and operations can merge. This is one way to avoid potential pitfalls.
SecOps should communicate and collaborate to prevent disagreements later, like when working on applications or code for the company. This is a team that works with other teams to provide holistic approaches that benefit everyone and stop potential cyber-attacks.
Another way to create success for this group is syncing up the SecOps tools alongside development tools. When they work together, you know that your development projects are running securely and smoothly. When run separately, SecOps can’t do their best work, and your risk of security breaches.
There are options for automated security management platforms that assist with managing processes and increase collaboration between your teams. Visore can help you with this.
Looking Ahead
The benefits of SecOps are plentiful and irrefutable. However, organizations still have trouble embracing it. To get the full advantage of SecOps, security teams, IT and management must align.
Together, they need the same goals. They also need excellent communication. They must be allies to one another and not obstacles to attain better results.
As SecOps initiatives become widely implemented in an organization, there is typically a cultural shift toward better security and information technology practices. As a catalyst, when leveraging SecOps the correct way, they will win over anyone who is reluctant to change their habits. This includes habits that can put the company at risk of a security breach.
All new IT resources will need to adhere to SecOps standards. These codes and policies are protection that is reliable against digital threats. They are not for preventing innovation, however, which can be a delicate balancing act for these teams.
When you have a successful SecOps, there is security-incident tracking available, which is imperative for creating prevention. Identifying, prioritizing, and providing remedies for such incidents are logged in one platform.
SecOps Versus SOC Explained
The active 24/7 command center representing your Blue Team, defending against threats is the SOC. Security operations center is a professional team that continuously analyzes and monitors a company’s security procedures, logs and active threat vectors. They defend the organization against security breaches working to minimize Dwell time and MTTR or mean time to resolution.
This team actively mitigates and isolates security risks around the clock. While they interact with other departments, they are mostly self-contained.
Often times but not always, the SOC is outsourced to a third party who runs SOC as their core service offering.
Even thought the SOC is part of SecOps, it is not the same thing. There is a lot of confusion here and some organizations make the mistake of standing up or outsourcing their SOC, thinking thats their entire SecOps. The best way to think of SecOps is that it is your processes, teams, and prevention tools that are used to minimize your attack surface and harden your defenses. SOC is your active surveilance system monitoring for intruders.
Security Operations Guide
When you officially form SecOps for your business, there are five roles that are key:
- Security Analysts–identify vulnerability and compliance issues
- Security Engineers–maintain and update both tools and systems
- IT Operations Manager–directs all IT teams and tasks for patching, network maintenance, and other IT infrastructure partnering with security team
- IR or Director of Incident Response–manages incidents as they occur
- CISO or Chief Information Security Officer–leadership who establishes policies and strategies as well communicates with executive team
There are many challenges for security operations teams, such as being understaffed and overworked. That’s why it’s important to leverage security automation and effective technology. These teams must keep up to date on current cyber threat intelligence.
While there may be challenges for SecOps, there are also solutions and tools that can help. That’s where we come in.
Security Solutions
As cyber security threats continue to rise, SecOps can help with standardization and good communication. At Visore, we simplify your security operations.
Gain insight, and react faster to cyber threats. We help you bring it all together into one security management platform. Reach out today for a demo and learn more about how Visore can make your SecOps more effective.