What is a Security Operations Center SOC?

A SOC—also sometimes called an information security operations center, or ISOC—is an in-house or outsourced team of IT security professionals. It is dedicated to monitoring an organization’s entire IT infrastructure 24x7, with a mission to detect, analyze and respond to security incidents in real-time. A SOC acts like the hub or central command, taking in data from across an organization's IT infrastructure, including its networks, devices, appliances, and information stores, wherever it resides.

Whilst the primary goal of cyber security solutions is to prevent attacks, this may not always be possible. The role of a SOC is to limit the damage to an organization by detecting and responding to cyber-attacks that successfully bypass existing preventative security controls. The SOC also selects, operates and maintains the organization's cybersecurity technologies and continually analyzes threat data to find ways to improve the overall security posture.

SOC further includes a multitude of security activities, making them responsible for proactive monitoring, incident response and recovery, remediation activities, compliance, and coordination and context.