SOC and Zero Trust: Enabling Comprehensive, Layered Security

Security Operations Centre (SOC) and Zero Trust Security are modern cybersecurity approaches that protect your organisation from evolving threats.

While SOC manages and improves your organisation’s overall security activities, zero trust security ensures all your devices, networks, and data are protected from malicious external or internal threat actors.

With growing cybersecurity concerns, organisations need to implement a layered approach to security by combining various security mechanisms.

Integrating zero trust and SOC in your cybersecurity efforts will pack a hard punch on cyber attackers, preventing the likelihood of attacks.
Let’s understand what SOC and zero trust are and how their combined effort is beneficial for your organisation.

A Security Operations Centre (SOC) is an internal or external IT security team consisting of the best technologies, processes, and people to continuously monitor, detect, and respond to cybersecurity threats and protect an organisation’s assets, such as networks, systems, and data from malicious actors.

A SOC coordinates all security operations and technologies in real-time to improve threat detection and response capabilities and aims to prevent future threats. It’s also responsible for choosing security technologies along with maintaining and operating them. In addition, the SOC team collaborates with various departments and shares important cybersecurity information with relevant stakeholders to manage risks.

A typical SOC team has some of the common roles and responsibilities:

• A SOC manager to manage and oversee daily security operations
• Incident responders to respond to incidents and find their scope, impact, and source
• Security analysts for continuous threat hunting by analysing logs and data sources
• Security investigators to deeply investigate threats and find their root causes
• Security engineer to create and/or apply security controls
  

Functions of SOC:

• 24x7 monitoring for security incidents
• Managing security posture with continuous threat detection and response
• Analysing network traffic, logs, and other sources of critical data to look for vulnerabilities
• Conducting vulnerability assessments and mitigation
• Preparing security policies and frameworks
• Selecting and applying cybersecurity technologies, processes, and policies
• Tracking and managing compliance requirements
• Creating and running cybersecurity skill development and awareness programs
  
  

A SOC team usually follows a tiered structure in its operations:

Tier 1: This is also called the triage level where the security personnel triage or assess security incidents and their source, scope, severity, and impact. In addition, tier 1 security professionals provide initial incident response and if the issue persists, they escalate it to the next tier.

Tier 2: This is the investigation level where security experts investigate a cybersecurity incident in detail to get to its root cause by analysing traffic, logs, etc. They also provide detailed reports and recommend remediation measures.

Tier 3: This is the threat hinting level where experienced security professionals actively hunt for vulnerabilities and threats in an organisation's networks and systems. They also support incident response, suggest remediation steps, and provide threat intelligence reports.

SOC-as-a-Service

SOC-as-a-Service (SOCaaS) is a service delivery model where an external service provider offers SOC capabilities to businesses. It helps improve an organisation’s overall security posture by detecting, analysing, responding to, and preventing vulnerabilities and threats.

For larger businesses with sufficient resources, it’s easier to maintain an in-house security operations centre (SOC). However, smaller businesses have limited resources like budget and workforce; hence, they often struggle with it.

If you belong to the latter or want to save yourself the hassles that come with maintaining a SOC in-house, you can outsource it to a reliable SOCaaS provider.

Benefits of SOCaaS

Benefits of outsourcing SOC to a trusted provider:

Cost-efficient: Instead of establishing a costly in-house SOC, you can get SOCaaS at a fraction of the cost by taking up a subscription service. In addition, you don’t have to manage staffing or perform maintenance, the service provider will take care of everything.

Faster threat detection and response: SOCaaS works 24/7 to hunt for threats and respond to them immediately. They use advanced technologies and cloud-based solutions to ensure no threat or vulnerability goes undetected.

Scalable: SOCaaS are scalable smoothly as your business scales up or down, which is difficult in the case of in-house SOC teams.

Hassle-free SOC adoption: Implementing SOC in network security is hassle-free with SOCaaS since you can get started with it really quickly. All you need to do is purchase a suitable plan while the service provider will take care of everything else. You’ll have the support of expert security professionals to guide your internal security teams.

Realising these benefits, businesses from across the world have started adopting SOCaaS heavily. According to Mordor Intelligence, the market size of SOCaaS in Europe alone was US$3.14 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach US$6.27 billion by 2029.

Zero Trust or Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) is a cybersecurity framework that requires organisations to verify every device and user attempting to access resources.

Zero trust adopts this principle - “never trust, always verify”. This means organisations and individuals should not trust an entity (person or system) 100% since cyberattacks can come from anywhere, both external and internal. Instead, they should ensure all users are continuously authenticated and authorised before granting permissions.

This way, zero trust aims to protect your complete IT infrastructure from cyberattacks and enable secure remote and hybrid work environments.

Principles of Zero Trust Security

Zero trust cybersecurity works on certain principles or foundational elements:

Continuous Monitoring and Validation
Unlike traditional models where internal trust is assumed, zero trust advises organisations to never trust any user or system whether it’s internal or external. It emphasises monitoring your systems continuously for security vulnerabilities, risks, and threats so you can detect and prevent attacks.

In addition, zero trust requires you to verify and validate every user and device for risks by assessing user behaviour, patterns, device health, etc. To implement this, you can enable risk-based access to verify users if there’s a change in risk levels. You can also deploy a scalable policy that covers not just security but also compliance with applicable regulations.

Least Privileged Access
The principle of least privilege says that an organisation must provide only the required access permissions to a user or account enough to complete their job. By limiting access to unnecessary resources, you can lower security risks from insider threats or compromised users or accounts.

To implement the least privileged access, keep revisiting roles and responsibilities in your organisation and update access permissions

Robust Authentication and Authorisation
Zero trust requires you to implement strong authentication and authorisation measures to ensure only authorised users and devices access your resources. Some of the methods you can apply are multi-factor authentication (MFA), identity and access management (IAM), risk-based access controls (RBAC), and biometric verification. This reduces unauthorised access risks and safeguards your data and systems.

Microsegmentation
Microsegmentation is dividing an organisation’s network into smaller zones or “segments”, each with its own policy, value, workflow traffic, use, and more. With zero trust network segmentation security, you can implement granular access controls to different workflows. Since some assets or data are more critical than others, they require different levels of protection.

Assume Breach
Zero trust security assumes there’s always the possibility of a cybersecurity breach. It can come from any direction (inside or outside) and happen at any time. This enables the organisation to stay vigilant all the time and apply a proactive cybersecurity strategy, tools, and policies. This way, you can minimise the risk of attacks and their impact and prevent threats by detecting and responding to them in real time.

According to Gartner, 63% of organisations globally have adopted zero trust security. This is due to the benefits it provides to organisations of all sizes.

Reduced Risks
Applying zero trust security in your organisation helps you reduce the likelihood of cybersecurity attacks and prevents malicious lateral movements.

For example, continuous monitoring using advanced monitoring solutions 24/7 helps you detect vulnerabilities and threats as soon as they occur, so you can resolve them quickly and secure your network. Zero trust principles, such as microsegmentation, authentication and authorisation, etc. minimise the attack surface and strengthen your security posture.

Secure Remote Work
To secure your remote workforce, you can apply zero-trust concepts, such as zero trust network access (ZTNA), least privileged access, and authentication mechanisms like MFA. It will ensure only authorised individuals access your network and data at the required levels, not more and validate all users and devices entering your network.

Compliance
With zero trust security architecture implemented, you can verify each user and device entering your network to ensure they are safe. You can check the devices’ health and compliance status before granting access. In addition, you can perform SOC compliance management for devices and block non-compliant devices from entering your network.

Cyberattacks have grown both in complexity and frequency. Data breaches increased by 72% in 2023, which is an all-time high. Impact? In 2024, a data breach costs an average of US$ 4.88 million.

This is why traditional perimeter-based security like firewalls is not sufficient to provide overall protection. Modern organisations must implement not just one but multiple layers of security to protect their network, devices, and data from malicious attackers.

The synergy between SOC and zero trust delivers unparalleled security by combining their capabilities. While SOC provides continuous security monitoring and advanced analytics on your network and systems, zero trust ensures only authorised devices and users access your resources.

This layered security provides a number of benefits to an organisation:

Continuous monitoring: A SOC continuously monitors and audits all security activities and policies, including zero trust strategies and policies. You can also update your policies based on current security needs.

For example, you can enforce two-factor authentication to identify legitimate users. The SOC team can track and analyse user behaviour and activities with machine learning and analytics for efficient risk mitigation and detection.

Gap analysis: With a SOC team at your disposal, you can conduct an in-depth security gap analysis. It will help you find the weaknesses in your zero trust policies and strategies and improve them. You can also enforce granular security policies based on behaviour, device posture, and user identity.

Threat detection and response: SOC teams with access to advanced threat intelligence and following zero trust strategies can proactively detect and neutralise threats in real time. This helps reduce the impacts of security incidents and protect your network and resources.

Behavioural analytics: SOC utilises behavioural analytics to frame baseline patterns for devices and users, keeping in mind zero trust principles like least privileged access, authentication and authorisation. If any user or device deviates from the baseline behaviour triggers risks. Security teams can then work on it to mitigate the risks.

Granular access controls: Zero trust emphasises strong access controls. Based on your organisation’s attack surface, SOC teams create stringent access control policies, such as identity and access management (IAM), role-based access controls (RBAC), zero trust network access (ZTNA), and more. It will ensure users with the required permissions can only access your network, devices, and data.

Compliance: SOC adheres to zero trust principles and ensures your organisation remains compliant with applicable compliance regulations and industry standards. This helps you avoid non-compliance risks, such as heavy penalties, reputation damage, and lost customer trust.

Talk to our experts today

Security Operations Centre (SOC) and zero trust security, when combined together, provide a stronger defence against advanced attacks.
Microminder offers a layered network security approach by integrating SOC and zero trust intuitively to protect your organisation’s network and assets. Our SOC-as-a-Service and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solutions are cost-effective, advanced, and can be tailored to meet your organisation’s unique security needs. We perform continuous monitoring, real-time threat detection and response to reduce risks and attackers’ dwell time. This helps reduce the likelihood of attacks and keeps your organisation secure and compliant with regulations.

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