Helping SME's enhance cyber capabilities and mitigate risks with a SOC-in-a-Box (Guest blog by Network Science)
The UK became one of the top three most attacked countries in Europe in 2021, along with Germany and Italy, according to the 2022 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index by IBM; and SMEs are particularly at risk. They represent more than 90% of all businesses in the UK but have fewer resources, limited budgets, and often lack in-house technical skills making them an easy target for cyberattacks. This is further compounded with the ever-growing list of regulatory requirements, rapid digitization and emerging hybrid working models post Covid-19.
Meanwhile, notwithstanding the challenges, a SOC can help an organization – large, medium, and small - to efficiently detect and respond to cyberattacks as well as comply with regulatory requirements. The challenge, however, is that organizations today struggle to deploy, manage, and maintain traditional SOCs due to the prohibitively high costs and multiple complexities involved. Furthermore, the niche technical capabilities required puts a traditional SOC out of reach of SME’s as well as select enterprises too.
Is there a way to overcome this? Sure.
Integrating leading open-source tools and layering it with best-practice processes can deliver an agile next gen SOC out of the Box. The modular, affordable, easy to use SOC can help SME's monitor threats and efficiently respond to security incidents.
Integrating a modern-day Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platform with a Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) system and Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) – all open source - can power a smart next-gen SOC and offer a simpler cost-effective alternative to proprietary options available in the market. When blended with matured threat detection content and best-practice processes, the resulting system will help SMEs to efficiently manage and respond to security incidents / vulnerabilities and comply with regulatory requirements.
How it all comes together
A SIEM would form the base system supporting threat detection, compliance and security incident management through the collection and analysis of security events, as well as a wide variety of other event and contextual data sources; thus, offering a holistic view of an organization's information security. Built-in or integrated XDR capabilities would further enable endpoint integrity monitoring along with vulnerability detection and management. The SOAR would help automate and streamline the incident response processes providing an organization the ability to implement sophisticated defense capabilities. This automation and orchestration of time-consuming, manual tasks together with smarter case management will enable lean IT/security teams to rapidly response to cyber challenges and better use their specialized skills. Alignment with the NCST Cybersecurity framework and context enrichment via the MITRE ATT&CK framework will further ensure effective detection, containment, and remediation. The integrated alerting and reporting capabilities will help simplify compliance with regulations.
Such a solution can be provided to SMEs via Cloud and MSSP marketplaces, and should be easily deployable in a few clicks (in the Cloud or on-prem) with the ability to be managed by a lean IT team.
Integration with other cybersecurity systems and Cloud platforms features will make the system even more versatile and scalable, enabling further cost effectiveness for the SMEs.
Helping SME’s address cybersecurity
A cyberattack can have a disproportionate financial, operational, and reputational impact on SMEs, with many of them being practically unable to absorb such shocks in today’s market conditions. Providing a smart, cost-effective, ‘agile’ SOC can enable them to secure their IT environment and defend against cyberattacks while at the same time also successfully complying with relevant regulations. And, given their agile nature, limited complex legacy technologies, and ability to quickly adopt new ideas and solutions, a SOC-in-a-Box solution can quickly provide SMEs with the cyber advantage that larger organizations have.
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Authors
Floyd DCosta
Floyd DCosta is the co-founder of Block Armour, a UK, Singapore, and India based Cybersecurity venture offering Blockchain-enabled Zero Trust security solutions for Enterprise systems, Cloud, and IoT.