Amidst the evolving cybersecurity landscape, Security Operations Centers (SOCs) work behind the scenes to keep organizations safe and secure from cyberthreats. They work ceaselessly, investing hours pursuing alerts and patching vulnerabilities. However, how do you know if your SOC is performing as expected?
It is by monitoring key metrics. These are vital signs that help you identify weaknesses, assess performance, and drive informed improvements. So, let’s navigate the dynamics of a modern SOC while looking at the seven key metrics every SOC must monitor.
Key metrics monitoring goes beyond collecting data. It involves interpreting data to make informed decisions that help streamline workflows and proactively identify emerging threats. You must focus on the right metrics to help SOCs increase efficiency, expedite responses, and mitigate the risk of a potential cyberattack. It helps you attend to different aspects of operations so that each stays in shape and contributes to better safety.
But which metrics should SOCs focus on while ensuring organizational safety? Let’s look at some of the most crucial ones in the next section.
From MTTD to User Behavior Analysis, here’s what SOCs must monitor to protect businesses against evolving and emerging cyber threats.
MTTD helps monitor how effective your detection tools and processes are. It identifies how quickly your operations center detects threats once they breach the system. Thus, MTTD represents a business’s speed and efficiency with which it detects threats.
Technically, it is the average time it takes from the moment a threat enters your network until your SOC detects it. So, remember, the lower the MTTD, the better for a business!
While MTTD is about the detection efficiency, MTTR denotes how swiftly your security team acts once it confirms a threat. It provides insights into an SOC’s ability to contain and neutralize threats before they spread, aggravate and escalate.
Again, in technical terms, MTTR is the average time SOC takes to contain, treat and recover from a security incident once it detects it. It is the duration from when the SOC validates an alert to the time the center neutralizes it.
Delayed responses can prove to be disastrous even catastrophic, particularly in high pressure environments! Hence, you must maintain a low MTTR.
This indicates the number of security incidents a business detected and handled during a period. It helps SOCs gauge the overall activity level on their network. A sudden surge might signal a coordinated attack or an emerging vulnerability. On the other hand, a steady number of incidents may signify a routine threat landscape. Security incident volume helps SOCs to allocate resources and align response tactics based on the tracking outcome.
This rate indicates the percentage of security alerts flagged as threats but turned out to be benign. Remember, a high false positive rate can overwhelm your SOC team. Your team members may spend valuable resources on non-issues, digressing from real threats.
Thus, you must measure the false positive rate to focus on legitimate risks. It will help you increase threat handling efficiency and minimize burnout among analysts.
False negative rates denote the number of incidents incorrectly tagged as non-cyber threats, while in reality, they were real. More false negatives signal the system’s tendency to ignore or overlook real security threats. It is a gap that requires immediate attention and resolution so that threats don’t go ignored!
Measuring false negatives involves identifying security events your systems should have detected, but they didn’t. Undetected events are difficult to identify. Hence, businesses use methods like retrospective analysis, quality sampling, and red team exercises.
Every missed metric could mean a missed threat, Partner with Diacto to build a smarter, faster and stronger SOC.
Incident escalation rate evaluates the number of incidents that required escalated resolution involving external specialists. A higher escalation rate signifies a shortage of expertise within the SOC team or the need for external resources to handle incidents.
Usually, 5 – 20% is the range for a well functioning SOC.
This metric involves monitoring and analyzing user behavior across the network to identify abnormal activities that could compromise accounts or cause insider threats.
It matters because not every threat comes from an outsider. Insider threats are just as damaging, whether intentional or not. User behavior analytics helps SOCs identify suspicious patterns like unusual logins, anomalies in accessing data, etc.
Choose Diacto! We offer comprehensive SOC evaluation services, helping you assess your SOC performance across crucial parameters and metrics. Our experts delve into your SOC operations, evaluate them, and provide a complete and transparent picture of your SOC performance.
The process also involves vital recommendations that help you make improvements and strengthen the cybersecurity guards around your business. Looking for more or an expert consultation? Email us at info@diacto.com and enter a dialogue with our SOC specialists.
