What is security operations (SecOps)?

SecOps can be viewed as an evolution of the traditional SOC model. In that model, cybersecurity and IT operations teams had separate, and sometimes conflicting, goals. IT was focused on keeping the technology behind business operations running optimally, while security teams prioritized preventing cyberattacks and adhering to compliance regulations. Those two functions could sometimes be at odds, since security activities and tools could slow down business-critical operations.

In today’s security landscape, however, businesses don’t have the luxury of thinking of security as an activity that’s adjunct to operations. With cyberthreats continually increasing and becoming more sophisticated, the consequences of a cyberattack can be dire. For businesses to avoid negative consequences, they must make security a priority in everything they do.

A SecOps organizational structure ensures greater alignment of security and IT teams by adopting a common set of goals, including:

With security and IT teams working closely together, security posture is a priority for both teams. They can share valuable information and use a common set of tools to prevent operational disruption.

In a traditional model, security is an afterthought. When security is considered earlier in every process—a trend referred to as “shift left security”—it increases the organization’s ability to mitigate risks before they become problems.

Giving SecOps teams a SOC with unified tools and more opportunities to communicate results in greater efficiency, less overhead, less downtime, and stronger security.

A typical SecOps team’s activities span several key functions, such as:

SecOps is responsible for monitoring an organization’s digital landscape for signs of malicious activity. SecOps teams proactively hunt for anomalous events across networks, endpoints, and applications and prepare to mitigate potential or evident cyberthreats.

Collecting and analyzing information about potential cyberthreats is an important SecOps function. A security information and event management (SIEM) solution allows security teams to directly access, ingest, and act upon threat intelligence at scale. Threat intelligence enriches data drawn from infrastructure, users, devices, applications, and more.

In the SIEM, machine learning alerts are correlated into incidents, helping analysts to detect, validate, prioritize, and investigate security-related events. Correlating multiple alerts into incidents allows SecOps teams to reduce alert noise and focus on the highest risks.

The SecOps team is responsible for confirming an actual cyberattack and implementing an incident response plan, which includes collecting evidence and contextual information, collaborating within the SOC to eradicate the cyberthreat and contain any data leaks, and then return the environment to a safe state. After a cyberattack, the team conducts forensic and root-cause analysis and uses those learnings to help prevent similar cyberattacks in the future.

One important activity of a SecOps team is to find potential gaps in an organization’s security protections. SecOps teams work together to find and address these vulnerabilities before a bad actor can exploit them. Vulnerability management includes scanning systems, applications, and infrastructure for weaknesses and remediating them.

Cybersecurity awareness is important for every user on the network, and SecOps teams are often responsible for educating users about common tactics cybercriminals might use. An effective SecOps team can strengthen overall security posture by creating an informed, security-first culture within the organization.

Adopting a SecOps model gives organizations the agility and information-sharing capabilities they need to meet the challenges of a relentlessly evolving cybersecurity landscape. The increasing frequency and sophistication of damaging cyberattacks such as ransomware and malware mean that SecOps teams need to be ready to act fast in the case of a breach. Implementing a SecOps approach to security can improve incident response times considerably without sacrificing operational speed or regulatory compliance.

Enhanced communication in a SecOps model helps teams to be more proactive against cyberthreats. Preventative activities such as cyberthreat hunting and insider threat detection become much more efficient with collaboration across teams in the SOC.

Taking a unified approach to security can also make SOCs more cost-efficient, especially when teams have the help of advanced threat detection and response tools such as an extended detection and response (XDR) solution.

SecOps teams across industries share a common set of daily challenges as they work to keep their organizations and users safe from cybercrime. These often include:

Cyberattacks are increasing in frequency year upon year, and many cybercriminals are well-resourced and motivated. That leads to a barrage of cyberthreat data and subsequent alerts for SecOps teams to sift through.

When new types of cyberthreats enter the scene, many organizations react by adopting new point solutions to address the needs of the day. In the long term, this can result in SecOps teams having to swivel between tools all day long and manually correlate cyberthreat data between them.

Sprawling digital estates that include data on premises and across multiple clouds, email, applications, and geographically dispersed endpoints can make it difficult for SecOps teams to get a single view of everything they need to protect.

A shortage of trained cybersecurity professionals has overburdened and fatigued many SecOps team members—and the shortage shows no signs of abating. Many security positions can go unfilled for months in the current environment.

As cyberthreats such as ransomware become stealthier and more damaging, often pivoting to move laterally through an organization’s digital environment, detection becomes high-stakes and increasingly difficult.

Cybersecurity technology is constantly evolving, and new or improved tools that streamline the work of SecOps teams emerge regularly. Many of them take advantage of advancements in automation and AI to simplify security work and make cyberthreats easier to detect. Here are some of the tools that they rely on to keep their organizations secure:

Pronounced “sim,” SIEM technology collects event log data from a range of sources, identifies activity that deviates from the norm with real-time analysis, and takes appropriate action. It gives organizations visibility into activity within their network to make cyberthreat detection and response faster.

EDR is a technology that monitors physical devices attached to an organization’s network for evidence of cyberthreats and takes automatic actions when a malicious actor uses an endpoint in a breach attempt. Endpoints can include computers, mobile devices, servers, virtual machines, embedded devices, and Internet-of-Things devices.

XDR is an evolution of EDR that broadens cyberthreat detection and response capabilities to a wider range of products, including not only endpoints but also servers, applications, cloud workloads, and networks. XDR provides end-to-end visibility of an organization’s digital estate and in addition to its detection and response capabilities, it furnishes prevention measures, analytics, correlated incident alerts, and automation.

SOAR allows SecOps teams who would otherwise be inundated with time-consuming tasks the ability to resolve incidents quickly. SOAR is a set of services and tools that automates aspects of cyberthreat prevention and response, such as unifying integrations, defining how tasks should be run, and creating incident plans.

There are many other cybersecurity tools that can help SecOps teams operate more efficiently. The most robust solutions are those that are integrated into a unified platform and that use the latest technology advancements such as automation and generative AI.

SecOps team members can thrive in today’s rapidly changing cybersecurity environment if they have technology built to take on the most sophisticated cyberthreats. A unified SecOps platform that’s powered by AI and spans prevention, detection, and response eases work and eliminates gaps. Microsoft Sentinel provides both SIEM and SOAR tools while integrating seamlessly with XDR.