Simplify and strengthen your security operations by outsourcing to a managed security operations centre. This blog explores how leveraging dedicated expertise and advanced tools can protect your business efficiently and affordably.
Full visibility of your technology estate is essential. And while SIEM (security information and event management) solutions afford the granularity and functionality required to protect your business, a security operation's overall management and maintenance can weigh heavy in cost and resource. A managed security operations centre offers a viable and affordable option - in time, money, and skills.
If you are considering building a security operations centre from scratch, you should know it can take months or even years to reach full operation and total security. Also, sourcing people to manage it and the tools needed to secure your business can be hugely expensive.
Increasingly sophisticated attacks from fraudsters and cybercriminals demand intelligent detection, interception, and even predictive technologies to identify and prevent. Poorly managed security operations or an inadequately implemented security operations centre (SOC) leave you vulnerable, putting your customers’ data and valuable IP at risk.
Switching to a managed security operation centre built on Microsoft Sentinel and leveraging dedicated expertise can help mitigate those risks and provide additional benefits.
1. Alert Overload
If your SIEM generates too many alerts, especially false positives, you might struggle prioritising real threats. Alert fatigue can lead to genuine risks being overlooked.
Poorly configured rules of overly broad thresholds and a lack of custom detection rules can result in an enormous volume of alerts. These alerts make it impossible to spot the signal in the noise.
Fixing the problem requires a deep understanding of attack patterns and tuning strategies. Machine Learning and AI can help you get some way towards total coverage, but you require expertise in model tuning, too.
What’s worse is that false positives can increase even after reducing alerts. Machine Learning models may incorrectly label and categorise activities meaning decreased precision but improved confidence in predictions.
2. Delayed Detection
A noticeable lag between security incidents and alerts indicates inefficiency in event correlation, possibly due to poorly defined rules or limited processing capacity.
Whether you have resource limitations causing a backlog, complex correlation rules, or data processing bottlenecks, any delays are unacceptable.
Increasing processing capacity is critical in optimising rules and adjusting retention periods for older data. However, if the delay is continuous or the data is incomplete, it might mean that detection rules have been configured incorrectly.
Managed systems eliminate this challenge and offer the added benefit of stripping away additional challenges of scaling and overhauling infrastructure.
3. Inadequate Coverage
If new systems, applications, or devices aren't covered because your SIEM hasn't been implemented correctly, there will be gaps in your coverage. Any gap, no matter how small, is a huge problem.
Running legacy software (or hardware) and new security systems is a double threat to your operation. One leaves you languishing behind more nimble competition, and the other leaves you vulnerable to threats in the cracks that can appear. You must configure your environment correctly and maintain it expertly to stay safe.
An additional complication is the subsequent mismatch and compatibility issues which arise from integrating old technology and new platforms.
You should be evaluating your security solutions regularly and searching for an environment or supplier capable of multi-cloud environments with additional connectors for expanded data source ingestion and coverage.
4. Compliance Gaps
Do you grapple with regulatory or internal compliance standards? These might stem from your SIEM’s inability to execute adequate monitoring or reporting.
Some SIEM systems are more difficult to configure and can leave gaps in your reporting. Implementing compliance-specific rules and conducting regular audits is essential to mitigate the risk but its a time-consuming and complex way to solve what can be a simple problem.
Seek out a SIEMs with built-in compliance reporting, and if cloud-based, that stay ahead of regulatory changes. You can even add compliance management solutions for further protection if you operate in a more highly-regulated industry.
5. Scalability and Integration Problems
6. Leverage Advanced Analytics
7. Poor UI/UX
Newer systems offer superior graphical interfaces, but configuration challenges still exist. They are designed for flexibility and handling multiple use cases; the hardest part is making vast datasets understandable.
When things are configured correctly, training times are dramatically reduced, too. New team members can be ramped up in virtually no time at all, and everyone can play their part in security.
Managed service providers will work with you to design and build dashboards and reports that are just right for you. Whether you want to focus on endpoints or analyse data flows internally, they can curate the perfect environment for you and your requirements.
8. No Automated Response To Threats
9. Budget & Resource Misalignment
Time to consider a managed service and SOC?
![microsoft transparent logo](https://conosco.com/hs-fs/hubfs/microsoft%20transparent%20logo.png?width=251&height=54&name=microsoft%20transparent%20logo.png)