7 Challenges in Scaling SOC Operations and How to Overcome Them

In the past four years, cyberattacks have more than doubled. Cybercriminals are leveraging emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to facilitate more sophisticated attacks. Geopolitical tumult has increased cyber risk. Couple these factors with a near-ubiquitous desire for businesses to expand their operations, and it’s easy to understand the need for scaling Security Operations Center (SOC) operations.

However, scaling SOC operations is no mean feat, especially considering the current threat, economic, and business landscapes. There are many challenges that SOC managers, CISOs, and SOC staff must overcome to scale their operations effectively. Here’s how to overcome them.

The entire cybersecurity industry faces a problem: staff shortages. Recent research suggests that four out of five companies either have fewer than five security analysts or don’t have enough analysts to run their SOCs. Even with some of the tools we’ll cover later in this article, scaling SOCs requires an increased workforce. Overcoming this problem is crucial to effectively scaling SOC operations.

One way to overcome staff shortages is to switch to a remote working environment. Doing so will significantly increase your hiring options—both because you have far greater geographical reach and because the most in-demand SOC staff will often leverage their market value and only apply for remote jobs.

Configuring tools correctly is the most crucial measure to minimize false positive churn. However, analysts can employ other techniques to mitigate this issue. For example, large language models (LLMs) can increasingly differentiate between false and legitimate alerts. While this technique doesn’t reduce false positives, it does reduce the effort necessary to investigate them.

Working in a SOC is rewarding but can be intensely stressful. So much so, in fact, that research from 2022 found that 71% of organizations ranked SOC staffer pain at 6 through 9 out of 10. There are soft solutions to employee burnout—recognizing hard work, offering initiatives to help manage work-life balance, and strong leadership, for example—but organizations can also manage this problem by employing the right tools.

Purchasing effective tools and technologies can transform SOC job satisfaction and motivation. It’s crucial to do your due diligence when purchasing cybersecurity solutions, prioritizing those that minimize false positives, effectively prioritizing alerts, and automating menial tasks.

Many of the most valuable SOC tools, such as Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) platforms, produce an enormous number of alerts. While this is, technically, a good thing, alert overload can easily overwhelm SOC staff and act as a barrier to scaling operations. To overcome this problem, SOC staff must strictly adhere to alert tuning best practices. For example, it’s crucial to:

• Understand your alert universe, determine what’s consuming your team’s time and effort, and weigh that against your detection accuracy.
• Prioritize tuning actions based on alert analysis.
• Investigate individual alerts composing a data point to deepen your understanding of the issue.
• Set requirements around what detections must look like in the SOC to be reviewed by the team.

Keeping these best practices in mind will significantly improve and streamline your ability to respond to alerts and facilitate scaling up.

Budget Limitations

Budget constraints seriously limit a SOC’s ability to scale. Organizational budgets are tight, but it’s crucial to prove to board members and decision-makers that cybersecurity is an important – if not essential – investment. CISOs must work closely with other C-suite staff and demonstrate the need for increased security budgets when scaling a SOC and the business. Focus on return on investment (ROI) and explain the necessary tools and technologies in a way that non-cybersecurity staff can understand.

Conclusion