Lower personnel cost
Deploying a SOC involves hiring security staff who are in tune with the security industry and are suitably experienced and skilled. Unfortunately, finding talented people to address all SOC related issues can be difficult, costly and time-consuming. An outsourced SOC enables immediate access to talented, certified and current cyber professionals. Even if companies are successful in hiring internal security experts, it may be difficult to justify keeping them in-house due to limited company budgets and the high salaries that expert security staff attract.
Scalability and flexibility
No two business needs are ever the same. For example, a small start-up company may require only a single security expert working for a few hours a day to remain secure, while a federal government agency may require several security experts all working around the clock. When the service is outsourced, it allows companies of any size to be effective through collaboration and developing solutions together to react quickly. It will also provide access to skilled or additional resources when they are needed and at scale. Access can range from immediate, in the event of a severe incident or breach, to a more gradual growth for a business with any critical data that may need protection. A quick and effective response time to cyber threats, facilitated by the support of a SOC, can save a company millions of dollars in legal costs, reputational damage, customer churn and business disruption.
Long-term ROI
Outsourced managed security service providers are typically effective, productive and mobile. Their experience in implementing, managing, monitoring and maintaining SOC tools, combined with their specialised security talent, reduces the time to become operational as well as the cost of implementation and ongoing management. This provides a good long-term return on investment by getting everything at a fraction of the cost that the company would incur by completing this internally.
Ongoing business focus
Security managers are often stretched far and wide across all parts of the company when it comes to operational matters. Responding to audit requests, enforcing company security protocols and fielding security questions from executives are often day-to-day processes and take time. Adding in security breaches, investigations and security incident reporting, and security managers quickly become overwhelmed and lack time to focus on what is important.
Having a dedicated SOC team that monitors, detects and responds to threats and vulnerabilities allows security managers to focus on core business functions while the SOC manages information security.
Situational awareness and security context
With the myriad attack vectors utilised by hackers to compromise a company network, there is the possibility that some vectors continue unnoticed. With a SOC, companies are better equipped to have a complete overview of the entire company. The SOC can share and highlight areas of concern and monitor those closely, while giving better context to threats and how they are being weaponised against the company – enabling it to better position itself against them.