The new Devo eBook, Building the Modern SOC, presents four evolutionary steps for creating a highly automated and efficient security operations center (SOC) that empowers analysts. This is the first in a series of blog posts that will introduce the four steps and highlight some of the most important concepts.

Today’s business environment entails a tremendous amount of data, along with many new applications, technologies, and security risks, all of which make the need for an effective SOC critically important.

As you might expect, building or upgrading to a modern SOC requires continuous innovation, investment, and improvement that must be adjusted as your business and its security needs evolve.

The Four Steps, which Devo recommends you implement in order, are:

1. Establish a foundation of centralized, scalable visibility.
2. Extract intelligent insights from your data.
3. Supercharge your analysts with the power of automation.
4. Streamline processes and achieve higher SOC productivity.

Let’s begin at the beginning, with Step 1: You can’t secure what you can’t see. This year’s Devo SOC Performance Report^TM found that the number-one reason for SOC ineffectiveness, according to 70% of survey respondents, is “lack of visibility into the IT infrastructure.” Let’s stipulate that visibility—specifically the lack thereof—is a big problem for SOC teams.

One of the most annoying barriers to centralized, scalable visibility is the proliferation of data silos. Data silos develop for several reasons, including teams wanting to control domain ownership and he use of disparate log-collection solutions for different data sources. Regardless of why they occur, data silos are a major impediment to effective organization and use of data for securing an organization.

The best solution for those frustrating data silos is to centralize all of your security data in the cloud. But older data needs to be “hot,” just like your real-time streaming data, so SOC analysts can effectively identify, hunt, and stop the threats that matter to your organization. And that’s why a next-gen SIEM that provides a scalable data platform and includes the analytics and automation capabilities critical for success, is the critical foundation of the modern SOC.

The next post in this series will cover Step 2, which involves extracting intelligent insights from your data. But if you can’t wait for the rest of this blog series, be sure to download the full eBook Building the Modern SOC now.