Security operations (SOC) leaders dream of having a fully scaled unit of security analysts equipped with advanced tools and automation to proactively detect, respond to, and mitigate threats with precision. The goal is to establish strategic, self-sufficient security advisors—a team who can decide on their own whether a security alert is a real threat. Or whether it's Steve in accounting sneaking a Bluetooth speaker onto the corporate network again!
In this ideal setup, alerts arrive in the SOC's inbox fully correlated and contextualized, with possible remediations already identified. Your team has the visibility they need to track down high-fidelity threats, and they can view the intelligence across every entity and security tool from a central point. This isn't just a single pane of glass; it's a command center that empowers your SOC team with the tools they need, exactly when they need them.
Unfortunately, some challenges stand in the way of SOC teams seeking this data-driven and more effective future:
These challenges are not insurmountable. In this article, we address each challenge, examining how your SOC can evolve and move away from an operations-driven to an outcome-driven stance—one that helps you strengthen defenses and proactively manage risks in today's complex threat landscape.
Every alert your SOC team receives is an opportunity to detect and respond to a potential threat. But, the problem is a lack of context and priority: an alert is often as likely to be an insider making a poor choice as it is to be a threat actor taking a malicious action. Few security tools provide the context needed to make effective, prompt decisions.
The sheer volume of data involved is unlikely to abate—and rather than working to reduce alerts, we recommend expanding the data your SOC analyzes as this can enhance its ability to identify and prioritize critical threats.
Unlike conventional models, Netenrich's approach combines AI-driven analytics with real-time correlation to deliver precise, prioritized insights. This ensures SOC teams act on the most critical threats, avoiding unnecessary distractions from low-value alerts.
SOC teams should adopt a data-driven model that continuously monitors expected actions and correlates behaviors to provide 'good data' with actionable context. Employing such a tool can limit false readings, empowering SOC teams to cut through the noise, focus on high-impact risks, and act with confidence.
Manual remediation workflows pose another challenge for SOCs. Despite the presence of automation in most tools, these workflows often fail to adapt to the dynamic nature of modern threats.
Netenrich sets itself apart by offering intelligent automation that is not static but evolves with real-time threat intelligence. This ensures that remediation workflows are consistent, proactive, and tailored to the context of each incident, enabling SOC teams to respond with precision and confidence.
Incident response is challenging at the best of times. Many security tools show isolated components of the attack chain for active cyber incidents, but often fail to unify this data into a comprehensive view of the threat. Because of that, SOCs often struggle to respond to active incidents in a timely manner. Worse, they often have an inconsistent response depending on the data quality being ingested.
When a cyberattack occurs, most aspects of the threat are not under the control of a targeted organization. These include who is targeting them, the attacker’s motivation, the timing and location of the attack, the attacker’s skills and resources, and—most critically—their persistence in achieving their goal.
What you need is to focus on data quality, data hygiene, and automation that correlate discrete alerts into a unified system architecture. This will give your team clarity on active incidents across the organization, making responses faster and more consistent.
Siloed data in multiple security tools can make it difficult to correlate data and build a cohesive picture of incidents accurately. Without comprehensive observability across the organization, you limit the SOC team's ability to respond to cyber incidents and protect critical data.
To go beyond rudimentary assessments of security posture and attack response, organizations need to merge isolated data into higher-level knowledge of organization-wide attack, vulnerability, and mission readiness in the face of cyber threats. Digital environments are always changing, with devices being added and removed, patches applied (or not), applications (un)installed, and firewall rules changed, all with potential impact on security posture.
What's necessary is to find the tooling that can unify intelligence across disparate data silos for comprehensive insight and observability.
To make informed decisions, organizations need situational awareness: the impact and evolution of an attack, the behavior of the attackers, the quality of available information and models, and the potential futures of the current situation.
This cross-environment correlation opens up the opportunity for improved incident response and intelligence to shift your SOC from a focus on alerts to focusing on outcomes.
Traditional threat response relies on swiftly detecting threat actor activity within critical systems.
Unfortunately, even the most extensively monitored system doesn't always provide SOC teams enough visibility into critical infrastructure to catch every possible compromise. This limits the opportunity that SOC teams like yours have to respond to attacks while also opening up the risk of data exfiltration.
Organizations need a data platform that allows them to ingest ALL the available security data into a unified platform. This means integrating and correlating all security data from diverse sources, such as logs, telemetry, and threat intelligence. Using AI-driven analytics and automation, this unified platform surfaces actionable insights, reduces noise, and highlights critical threats. This holistic approach enables real-time monitoring, better decision-making, and faster threat response.
Despite the significant attention on the critical problems of cybersecurity, the ability to keep up with the increasing volume and sophistication of cyber-attacks is seriously lagging.
The reality is that digital environments are always changing, with devices being added and removed, patches applied (or not), applications installed and deleted, and firewall rules changed, each with distinct impacts on security posture.
Threat detection alerts need attention, and even mostly benign events such as logins, service connections, and file share access could be associated with adversary activity. The problem is not a lack of information; rather, it's the ability to assemble disparate pieces of information into an easily comprehensible picture to support optimal courses of action and maintain mission readiness. In other words, you require 'situational awareness' or the ability to address incoming stimuli and provide the appropriate response.
Over the next decade, it will become clear that digital business opportunity and digital business risk are fundamentally intertwined—zero risk, zero opportunity. In this world, the key capability for security professionals will be to continuously discover, assess, and adapt to ever-changing risk and trust levels. Security infrastructure and security decisions must become continuous and adaptive—enabling real-time decisions that balance risk, trust, and opportunity at the speed of digital business.
Transformative security and risk management leaders will need to embrace a strategic approach where security is adaptive, everywhere, all the time. Only then will they truly work toward intelligently scaling the modern SOC.
While tools like AI and automation play a critical role in enhancing visibility and accelerating responses, the foundation of a truly effective SOC lies in its people and their ability to focus on high-value tasks that align with organizational priorities. The journey to achieving your vision of a scalable, intelligent SOC is as much about mindset and alignment as it is about technology and processes.
Achieving the goal of an intelligent SOC requires addressing challenges head-on—breaking down data silos, embracing automation, and ensuring every team member aligns with a shared vision.
Netenrich's platform combines real-time threat intelligence, dynamic playbooks, and AI-driven analytics to enable SOC teams to predict, prioritize, and act with precision. These methodologies ensure not just reactive defense but a proactive, scalable approach to modern threat landscapes.
With the right tools and actionable insights, your team can become a confident, proactive force, capable of responding to threats effectively while driving robust defense strategies. Aligned with business goals and sharing a unified vision, your SOC will now be fully prepared to thrive in a rapidly changing threat landscape.
And who knows—maybe Steve in accounting will finally stop sneaking Bluetooth speakers onto the network!