Best Practices for SOC Tooling Acquisition

Your Security Operations Center (SOC) faces complex challenges for keeping corporate data safe and in the right hands everyday. The right tooling is critical for success.

Deciding when—and how—to make investments in SOC tooling is complex and challenging across organizations. There’s a ton of vendor spin out there and it’s important to understand what’s real and what isn’t.

These SOC tooling decisions come at a time when every dollar spent on technology tooling will be scrutinized due to economic uncertainty.  

Here’s the truth: there’s no one-size-fits-all way to address SOC tooling. Your SOC needs will be different from the SOC needs of other organizations. No matter what vendors try to sell you, you’re obligated to make the best choice for your organization and yours alone.

What to Know About Selecting the Right SOC Tools

Odds are, unless you’re at a huge enterprise organization, your SOC team will be relatively small and you’ll need tooling to help fill gaps.

Your tools will need to cover a wide range of areas, including monitoring, threat detection, threat intelligence, incident response and others to keep your data secure. Everything you use needs to be designed to help your organization, and be the right fit for what you’re doing.

Organizations also need to pick a tooling model that works for them. Is single-vendor the right way to go? Or multi-vendor? You’ll need to determine how that approach will impact pricing, and if the vendor has the products you need.

Additionally, be aware of how vendors have put their solutions together. Were they built by acquisition and loose integration? Are they trying to sell you “XDR” which is really just a mish-mash of different solutions? Figure out what you need for your use case and go from there.

The Importance of SIEM in SOC Tooling

Organizations just starting their SOC tooling journey can look to SIEM and log management solutions as a way to get a view into what’s happening within your security infrastructure. 

In an increasingly cloud-first world, a tool that helps you navigate the needs of cloud-native infrastructure means you could have unique needs for a SIEM. You’ll want a SIEM that provides:

• A custom correlated detection engine 
• A dynamic lookups engine 
• Threat intelligence out of the box as a data source 
• Writing detections on behalf of our customers, so we do the correlation for them
• Researchers to put all that together and deploy it across a SaaS-based SIEM

Some tools such as the Logz.io Cloud SIEM are built as SaaS solutions, so the provider manages the deployment, scaling, upgrading, and maintenance of the SIEM. This offloads time-consuming installation and maintenance for the customer.

Get the SOC Tooling Selection Tips You Need

Gartner recently published a report to help your organization with SOC tooling selection, and Logz.io is thrilled to offer complimentary access.

With this report, you’ll get the critical insights you need to:

• Prepare stakeholders for a process-driven evaluation
• Align the selection process to your SOC operating model and goals
• Identify technology investments to provide the best results against new threat vectors and address your biggest blind spots
• Better adapt to organizational and business changes

For more expert opinion on how best to address SOC tooling, download a complimentary copy of the Gartner report “Tips for Selecting the Right Tools for Your Security Operations Center” today.