Optimising SOC Performance with Open XDR Services: A Technical Perspective

Security Operations Centre (SOC) teams manage an organisation’s cybersecurity operations.
But, they face many challenges in the process due to an extensive number of tools and data volumes to manage, emerging cyber attacks, remote workforce, and other factors.

To solve the challenges of your SOC team and optimise their performance, you can use a unified security platform, such as Open XDR.

What Is SOC?

A Security Operations Centre (SOC) is a team of security experts and IT professionals who supervise and manage an organisation’s cybersecurity operations. It serves as a central hub that monitors a company’s complete IT infrastructure to find security vulnerabilities, threats, and risks. The team includes:

• A SOC manager to oversee security operations and run the team
• Security engineers to create and improve security strategies and policies
• Security analysts detect, analyse, prioritise, and mitigate threats
• Threat hunters (expert SOC analysts) to detect and contain advanced threats

Depending on the organisation, the team could also include other professionals, such as forensic investigators and a Director of Incident response, etc.

A SOC team prioritises and responds to risks in real time to protect systems, data, networks, applications, and other assets from adversaries. It also tracks and manages changes in laws and regulations to be able to make adjustments and meet compliance.

Using current and historical data, the team strengthens your incident response plans, security policies, and procedures. SOC also introduces better and more advanced toolsets, technologies, and techniques to increase your cyber resilience.

With a dedicated SOC team by your side 24/7, you can maintain your cybersecurity and compliance posture and keep away risks, such as cyber threats, data exposures, violations, and penalties. This way, you can uphold the trust of your customers, partners, investors, and other stakeholders, and keep your business running strongly.

A SOC team can be physical and in-house or virtual and outsourced from a managed security services provider (MSSP), such as Microminder CS. Establishing an in-house team is expensive and requires advanced cybersecurity skills, which smaller organisations may not have the budget for. But, an outsourced SOC can save organisations of all sizes money and the hassles of managing everything on their own.

Functions of SOC

Let’s talk about some of the main functions of a SOC team:

Asset Inventory

SOC teams list and maintain an accurate inventory of organisational assets that need protection from threats. These assets are applications, data, servers, endpoints, cloud resources, databases, computer systems, network components, and other devices. The list also includes security tools, such as antivirus software, IDS/IPS tools, digital surveillance cameras, vulnerability scanners, etc.

Gathering Threat Intelligence

A SOC team keeps on collecting data on cyber threats and the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) attackers use. The data could include recent threats, past security risks you faced, emerging security vulnerabilities and risks, etc., and insights from different security and SOC automation tools installed in your IT environment. After collection, it stores cyber threat intelligence in a secure, encrypted system and regularly updates and maintains the data.

Incident Response Planning

A SOC team creates an organisation’s incident response planning. The plan includes roles, responsibilities, and processes to follow should a real cyber attack strike. The SOC team outlines strategies and tools to identify and mitigate threats to reduce their impacts on the business.
SOC also defines metrics, such as mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), incident resolution rate, etc. This lets you measure how effective your incident responses are and improve the plan to achieve better outcomes.

Continuous Monitoring

SOC teams continuously monitor your IT infrastructure, including applications, databases, systems, networks, cloud resources, etc., for cyber threats. The team looks for indicators of compromises (IoCs), indicators of attack (IoAs), and signs of suspicious activities or known exploits.

For efficient monitoring, the SOC team uses tools, such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), network security monitoring tools, application security monitors, extended detection and response (XDR) tools, and more.

Threat Detection

SOC teams use various techniques to detect threats such as vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, web application testing, cloud security assessments, API security testing, third-party risk assessments, red teaming and blue teaming, tabletop exercises, and more.

The thing is monitoring is not enough; you need to supplement it with powerful analysis, which makes the real difference. A SOC team regularly analyses monitoring data and event logs to be able to detect security vulnerabilities, threats, and risks faster and more accurately with minimal false positives/negatives.

Modern SOC teams use AI and ML techniques with capabilities, such as behaviour analysis and pattern recognition. AI-driven threat detection lets them find threats and triage risks based on severity levels by sifting through large volumes of log data.

Investigation and Mitigation

If the SOC team detects a cyber threat, it implements the incident response plan to mitigate the threat and reduce the level of impact. The team starts investigating the threat to understand its type, the number of assets it has already compromised, and the root cause of the threat.

SOC professionals immediately contain the compromised systems to prevent the threat from spreading to other systems. They use tools such as EDR, XDR, SIEM and SOAR, etc. to respond to threats.

Compliance Management

SOC tracks all the rules and regulations applicable to your organisation based on where you operate, what industry you belong to, and the type of data you handle. The team ensures each of your systems, applications, devices, tools, and processes comply with applicable regulations. This helps you comply with bodies such as UK GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, NIST, ISO 27001, etc.

If a security incident occurs, the SOC team immediately notifies the concerned authorities, resolves threats, recovers data and operations, and creates reports for auditing and investigation purposes.

Continuous Security Improvements

To prevent similar threats to your organisation, the SOC reviews the incident and security operations thoroughly to find gaps. This allows them to refine security strategies, techniques, and policies, and improve current incident response planning. In addition, the SOC team also runs cybersecurity awareness and training programs to apply security organisation-wide. This keeps you prepared for future threats.

Challenges with SOC Teams

With plenty of tools and systems in the IT infrastructure, remote workforce, bring-your-own-device policy, and emerging cyber-attacks, security professionals face many challenges while managing threats and other security operations.

Extensive Toolsets

SOC teams use many security tools and devices to speed up their operations, reduce manual effort and errors, and save time. Some of the tools are IDS/IPS solutions, antivirus tools, EDR, XDR, vulnerability scanners, SIEM, SOAR, etc. But, the increasing number of tools increases complexity, including:

• Managing logs and data from multiple systems
• Analysing and correlating data from various security tools
• Ensuring tools’ security from attackers
• Maintaining tools with updated versions and patch management

These complexities impact SOC performance. The teams may miss out on important data and face difficulty in detecting advanced threats, such as APTs, ransomware, phishing, etc.

Alert Fatigue

SOC teams receive hundreds of alerts from security tools, which are mostly false positives. Now, the problem is that if you go on investigating each alert individually, it will consume a lot of time. It’s futile to spend your time running behind false positives.

If you see the broader picture, managing a high volume of alerts burns out your SOC teams, delays threat response, and degrades SOC performance. Alert overload could also lead to security analysts missing critical threats and making ineffective decisions while in a hurry. It also prolongs the dwell times of threats, which increases risks.

Poor Integration and Visibility

Most organisations rely on third-party tools from different vendors to build their security infrastructure. This may include various stand-alone solutions with limited or no shared telemetry or intelligence. These tools could also have poor integration capability with other tools to be able to speed up detection and response.

As a result, creating context-rich views to be able to detect threats effectively across the infrastructure becomes difficult for the SOC team. So, if you don’t have full visibility into your assets and data, there’s a chance that threats could slip by undetected. Poor visibility also delays threat detection and response, meanwhile, the threat actor keeps on compromising systems and data.

Skill Shortage

Cybersecurity skill shortage is real that businesses globally have felt. This means there are fewer number of cybersecurity professionals against a large number of attackers, creating an imbalance. In 2023 and 2024, 60% of respondents said their company has a shortage of cybersecurity staff.

The skills shortage impacts SOC performance and operations, particularly when an organisation faces a cyber attack. It affects threat discovery and mitigation with efficiency. Smaller organisations are hit badly as they might not have a dedicated SOC team to handle threats and attacks.

Compliance Complexity

Laws and regulations change with new challenges and innovations. But if you don’t align your SOC operations to these changes, you may end up violating rules. You may face non-compliance risks, such as heavy penalties and fines, higher scrutiny from regulators, and customer trust.

This requires SOC teams to keep a constant tab on security and data privacy standards and regulations, such as UK GDPR, PCI DSS, SAMA, HIPAA, etc. This process is time-consuming, lengthy, and risky.

What Is Open XDR and How Does It Solve SOC Challenges?

Open (Extended Detection and Response) XDR is a cybersecurity solution that allows you to integrate security tools from different vendors to collect telemetry and intelligence and simplify security operations. It helps you detect, investigate, and mitigate cyber threats to protect your organisation and data and maintain compliance with regulations.

Traditional XDR services are of two types:

Native or Closed XDR: It lets you integrate security tools from a single vendor.

Hybrid or Open XDR: It lets you integrate security tools from different vendors and sources.

XDR actually evolved from endpoint detection and response (EDR). Now, EDR collects security data from multiple endpoints, emails, cloud resources, etc. and then filters and condenses it into a single view (through XDR) for efficient threat detection and mitigation.

Using Open XDR services, you can integrate your existing security stack with SIEM, SOAR, EDR, IAM, IDS/IPS, cloud access security broker (CASB), next-gen firewall (NGRW), and other tools. This allows you to gather and correlate data from different tools and analyse them to detect cyber threats more accurately, generate quality alerts, and respond to threats faster.

Key Features of XDR

Here are some of the features of Open XDR that make it an excellent solution for modern SOC teams:

Vendor agnostic: Open XDR supports integrations from multiple security services providers, instead of restricting you to a single vendor. This means you don’t have to replace any tool or worry about compatibility issues anymore. You can easily connect various tools and utilise telemetry to nurture your incident response plan. You can also use Open XDR for real-time threat hunting.

Centralised data: Open XDR centralises cyber threat intelligence and security telemetry data from various tools and cloud environments into a single place. This enables you to view alerts from tools, systems logs, detected threats, compromised systems, etc. and make informed SOC decisions.

Scalable and flexible: With no vendor lock-ins, you can use advanced security solutions from any provider to beat emerging threats and ensure compliance with changing laws and regulations. It also lets you scale your SOC operations up or down based on your current requirements without hassles.

Alert and prioritisation: Open XDR solutions don’t overwhelm your SOC team with too many or unnecessary alerts. It collects and correlates data from different security tools and groups similar ones to generate accurate alerts. It also prioritises alerts based on risk levels to trigger their remediation first.

Analytics and reporting: Open XDR services can also offer AI-based analytics to improve your SOC team’s effectiveness in detecting and remediating threats. You may also get reports on security incidents, their root causes, how they were addressed, their impacts on your business, and more. You can use this report for audits and future reference.

How to Optimise SOC with Open XDR

Open XDR is a scalable, flexible, and efficient tool that can help you detect and neutralise threats proactively and simplify your SOC operations. Here’s how it can optimise SOC using Open XDR services:

Smooth Integrations

Unlike traditional XDR which limits integration capabilities, Open XDR allows you to integrate any security solution of your choice from any vendor without hassles.

You can add security solutions, such as EDR, IAM, CNAPP, CASB, firewalls, antivirus software, IDS/IPS, etc. to your security tech stack. It will help you gather security telemetry and threat intelligence from different sources, share on-premises and cloud data effortlessly, and simplify log management to fuel your threat detection and response efforts. This also takes away your SOC team’s compatibility concerns and prevents you from replacing security tools.

Improved Threat Detection

Open XDR correlates data from various security tools and solutions. It could be third-party applications and services, cloud resources, or on-premises devices and systems.

Your SOC analysts can apply cloud security analytics to identify complex cybersecurity threats. They can find vulnerabilities and risks using vulnerability scanners and perform threat hunting with powerful cyber threat intelligence containing data on attackers’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This saves your SOC team’s time spent in fine-tuning detection strategies.

Centralised Data Collection

With Open XDR in your toolkit, you will get a centralised view of all security data in a single platform. This means you don’t have to rely on individual security tools to give you complete protection. Instead, Open XDR collects data from different tools and consolidates it in a central location.

Your SOC team can visualise the data to understand security and compliance posture. You can overview all your assets, compromised systems, suspicious users, security policies, and security incidents in one place. This helps you make better remediation decisions and incident response planning.

Lower Alert Fatigue

Open XDR services group together related alerts to reduce the number of overall alerts that your SOC analysts need to investigate and address. Collating alerts also removes high-volume, low-risk alerts generated by tools, such as firewalls.

This means you will get high-quality alerts that you would want to address and keep your business secure from threats. In addition, Open XDR can prioritise alerts based on how severe they are and their impacts on the business. This will enable you to address risker threats first.

All this reduces alert fatigue among SOC staff and improves their productivity, so they can respond to threats effectively and make better decisions.

Automated Incident Response

Open XDR platforms can automate some incident response activities, such as isolating compromised systems, triggering workflows, blocking malicious network traffic, and more based on your incident response plan, security playbooks, and organisational policies.

Automated threat response reduces the time it takes to resolve threats or mean-time-to-response (MTTR). This frees your SOC team’s time in handling similar incidents. Instead of performing repeated activities, they can dedicate their time to refining their security policies and upskilling.

Enhance SOC Effectiveness with Microminder’s Open XDR

Microminder’s advanced Open XDR platform has capabilities to simplify your SOC operations and improve your cybersecurity and compliance posture. The platform allows you to integrate with any security solution, collate telemetry across systems, and detect and respond to threats faster. Some of the features of our Open XDR solution:

• Next-gen SIEM integration to identify complex, multi-vector threats
• Extended detection and response (EDR) tool with intelligent auto-correlation to find and fix security incidents
• Network Detection and Response (NDR) using ML to eliminate network threats
• Automated Threat Hunting to find risks and neutralise them before any harm comes your way
• Automated threat response to improve MTTR
• Cloud security monitoring with Amazon S3 access logs and ELB access logs

Explore our Open XDR services for SOC optimisation