SecOps, also known as security operations, refers to a company’s integration of internal information security and IT operations procedures to enhance communication and lower risks. Most companies have always seen security and IT operations as separate tasks by various organizations using different strategies and processes.According to Gartner “Organizations often struggle to identify how the threat landscape can impact their environment, procure the right technologies and improve security operation efficiencies. Security and risk management leaders can improve all three, starting with defining their intelligence requirements”.These compartmentalized organizational systems need to be more frequently effective and broken. Each group has distinct, sometimes competing goals. Teams in charge of operations concentrate on enhancing system performance and speeding up IT service agility. On the other hand, security teams focused on defending infrastructure against malicious assaults, safeguarding private information, and adhering to industry and governmental laws. 

There is a natural conflict between security teams, whose goal is to protect sensitive IT systems and data, and IT operations teams, who are under pressure to deliver new applications and services as rapidly as possible. By adopting a security-first attitude and integrating security into IT operations procedures, security operations dissolve organizational and cultural boundaries, inefficiencies, and disputes. With SecOps, risk and threat reduction are shared responsibilities. Processes and security experts collaborate closely to decrease vulnerabilities without compromising business agility. 

SecOps vs. DevOps vs. DevSecOps 

SecOps, DevOps, and DevSecOps all refer to various strategies for fusing multiple functional organizations and processes. DevOps is the practice of integrating development and IT operations to enhance cooperation, eliminate waste, and quicken the speed of innovation, much like SecOps is the practice of integrating security with IT operations. By integrating security into DevOps and taking security into account across the whole software development, delivery, and deployment lifecycle, DevSecOps takes a step further. Shifting security left, or “shift left,” is a common requirement of the DevSecOps methodology to handle security earlier in the application development lifecycle. 

What are the benefits of implementing SecOps? 

There are several financial advantages for IT businesses that effectively apply the SecOps concept. 

Improved communication between IT security and operations teams is the first and most evident advantage of SecOps. Organizations may finish projects more quickly and drastically minimize duplication of effort when they empower teams to collaborate and break down information barriers. A security operations center and a specialized SecOps staff can also lead to: 

Fewer security breaches–Early cyberattack detection is made possible by coordinated network monitoring, which also lowers the number of data breaches and protects data while upholding privacy and security standards. 

Fewer security vulnerabilities–Thanks to the involvement of security experts throughout earlier phases of development, code is safer when it enters the production environment. Fewer security vulnerabilities, therefore, affect the IT enterprise. 

Fewer security distractions–False positives are less of a distraction for SecOps teams who aim to automate tasks like threat detection and alerting and focus more effectively on real security concerns that call for a response. 

Security Operations centers 

A Security Operation Center (SOC), a centralized position within an organization, employs personnel, protocols, and technology to continuously monitor and improve the company’s security posture while preventing, detecting, analyzing, and responding to cybersecurity problems. 

A SOC, which acts as a hub or central command post, gathers an organization’s IT infrastructure, including its networks, devices, appliances, and information repositories, wherever such assets are situated. The rise of sophisticated threats highlights the need to gather context from many sources. In essence, the SOC serves as the point of linkage for all events documented inside the monitored company. The SOC must choose how these occurrences are handled and responded to. 

What does a SecOps center do? 

Establishing a defined set of goals, roles, and duties for SecOps is one of the biggest problems that IT businesses confront. The management of the continuing protection of the organization’s information assets should be handled by an integrated team of security and operations that consistently complies with service level agreements and application performance goals. Many IT companies set up a particular security operations center (SOC) where members of the SecOps team may cooperate and work towards these goals. 

The SOC performs five critical functions. 

There are five basic functions performed by security operation centers: 

Alert Ranking and Management 

The SOC is in charge of carefully reviewing all warnings generated by monitoring systems, eliminating any false positives, and figuring out how aggressive any real threats are and what they could be aiming at. This enables them to correctly prioritize new dangers, taking care of the most pressing problems first. 

Threat Response 

The SOC responds as soon as an incident is confirmed, shutting down or isolating endpoints, ending hazardous programs (or stopping them from running), erasing data, and other responses. The objective is to respond to the extent required while minimizing the impact on company continuity. 

Recovery and Remediation 

The SOC seeks to restore systems and retrieve any lost or compromised data following an incident. In the event of ransomware attacks, this can entail installing workable backups to get around the ransomware, wiping and restarting endpoints, or reconfiguring systems This process puts the network back in the condition it was before the event. 

Security Refinement and Improvement 

Because cyber criminals continually modify their tools and strategies, the SOC must continuously apply enhancements to stay one step ahead. The Security Road Map’s ideas are implemented at this stage but can also involve practical exercises like red-teaming and purple-teaming. 

 Root Cause Investigation 

The SOC determines precisely when, how, and why something happened following an occurrence. The SOC uses log data and other inputs during its investigation to determine the primary source of the problem and prevent a recurrence. 

Conclusion 

Security Operations functions as a centralized coordinating unit to manage cybersecurity risks and events based on the security concept of people, processes, and technology. Metrics acquired from the business IT infrastructure’s many devices and data repositories are essential to security operations. For more insightful blogs visit auxin.io