Traditional areas of risk - financial risk, operational risk, geopolitical risk, risk of natural disasters - have been part of organizations’ risk management for a long time. Recently, information security has bubbled to the top, and now companies are starting to put weight behind IT security and Security Operations Centers (SOC).

Easier said than done, though. Why you ask? Two reasons:

• It’s newer, so it’s less understood; process maturity is less commonly available
• Skill shortages — many organizations might not yet have the right skill mix and tools in-house.

From our own experience creating and staffing an SOC over the past three years, here are the top three rules:

1) Continuous communication

It’s the fundamental dictum (sort of like “location” in real estate). Bi-directional management to the IT team.

Management communicates business goals to the technology team. In turn, the IT team explains threats and their translation to risk. Management decides the threat tolerance with their eye on the bottom line.

We maintain a Runbook for every customer which records management objectives and risk tolerance.

2) Tailor your team

People with the right skills are critical to success and often the hardest to assemble, train and retain. You may be able to groom from within. Bear in mind, however, that even basic skills, such as log management, networking expertise and technical research (scouring through blogs, pastes, code, and forums), often come after years of professional information security experience.

Other skills, such as threat analysis, are distinct and practiced skill sets. Intelligence analysis, correlating sometimes seemingly disparate data to a threat, requires highly developed research and analytical skills and pattern recognition.

When building or adding to your threat intelligence team, especially concerning external hires, personalities matter. Be prepared for Tuckman’s stages of group development.

3) Update your infrastructure

Security is 24x7x365 – automatically collect, store, process and correlate external data with internal telemetry such as security logs, DNS logs, Web proxy logs, Netflow and IDS/IPS. Query capabilities across the information store requires an experienced data architect. Design fast and nimble data structures with which external tools integrate seamlessly and bi-directionally. Understand not only the technical needs of the organization, but also be involved in a continuous two-way feedback loop with the SOC, vulnerability management, incident response, project management and red teams.

Easy, huh?

Feeling overwhelmed thinking about a Security Operations Center? Get SIEM Simplified on your team.