Why SOC and NOC teams can benefit by Working Closely Together

The Network Operations Center (NOC) and the Security Operations Center (SOC) are two essential pillars of any organization. The two teams continually monitor the logs and events of different tools to ensure that the network remains operational and protected from cybersecurity attacks. The NOC team resolves incidents that affect network performance or availability, while the SOC team deals with incidents that affect the security of the organization's vital assets, thereby responding to malicious threats. Every day, the NOC and SOC teams are invited to do more with less, as cost center funding is struggling to keep up with business growth.

Maintaining network availability and effectively defending a corporate network when NOC and SOC teams work in silos creates an additional challenge. Although there are many network and security tools for SOC and NOC teams, each team generally generates its own incidents and does not share information. This lack of interoperability and the inability to share event data translate to inefficiencies, poor agility, limited visibility, and ultimately poor organizational security posture. According to ESG's research report on security operations challenges, priorities and strategies in 2017, monitoring the volume of security alerts and lack of integration between various security tools are among the biggest operational challenges Security According to the same survey, investing in technologies to automate security operations and threat detection through the integration of various tools is a top priority among security operations teams.

To improve efficiency and collaboration between cybersecurity and the IT operations team, organizations are investing massively in automation and orchestration of incident response to track the volume of security alerts, make decisions about prioritizing alerts, and reduce incident response time. Furthermore, according to the Infosec Island article, although there are subtle differences between SOC and NOC, more and more organizations are making the two groups work more often with overlapping team members, allowing them to break silos, gain centralized visibility, and facilitate the exchange of information. This reduces costs and improves the efficiency of NOC and SOC equipment. For example, SOC can identify problems and recommend solutions to the NOC. NOC can then analyze the impact of the corrections and make the corresponding changes. Therefore, the close alignment of NOC and SOC teams can enable companies to integrate network and security workflows, management and response capabilities, allowing the organization to be more aware of its limits and improve capacity. to defend their networks.