SIEM vs. SOC: 7 Critical Differences

The 2023 State of Threat Detection: The Defenders’ Dilemma, from Vectra AI, reveals the roadblocks in front of your security team to secure the organization from cyber threats and why the current approach to managing security operations is unsustainable. This is in the face of organizational spending of up to 3.3 billion U.S. dollars every year on manual triage costs alone, and security teams carrying the burden of trying to minimize ever-expanding attack surfaces and sort through the thousands of daily, ever-increasing alert volume.

The study found that the following were the cases in most companies within the last 3 years:

• 63% of companies reported that their attack surface had increased. A majority of security analysts were unable to deal with 67% of daily alerts received, with false positives growing in volume.
• Up to three hours per day was wasted on manually triaging alerts. 97% of security analysts were worried that they had missed out on relevant security events.
• 34% of analysts have considered quitting their jobs because they simply cannot protect the organizations due to a lack of access to the right tools and solutions.

SIEM systems log threat data in real time from various sources and offer security event correlation. They aid enterprise teams in detecting system anomalies by automating the manual processes associated with incident response and threat detection. Over the years, these solutions have evolved to include UEBA (User Entity Behavior Analytics) as well.

SIEM requires SOC teams to overlook the cyber defense strategy of organizations. SOCs are, in effect, a team of security experts who can, at all times, monitor, comprehend, and analyze security-related events. Such teams provide access to different tools and technologies that help in threat detection, incident response, and mitigation of risks, including systems such as SIEM. SIEM is automation in action while SOC is the human element of cyber security. Both are crucial in this fast-moving cybersecurity landscape.

Together, SOC and SIEM allow companies to enable both robust digital protection and enterprise agility, increasing responsiveness. We will now expand on the seven critical differences between SIEM vs. SOC, and give you a detailed insight into the two.

What is SIEM?

Security Information and Event Management help reduce the burden on security teams by aggregating data from various sources, running analytics on the same, and helping experts figure out probable threats, hence avoiding alert fatigue. It enables them to create priority lists of actual risks and design effective attack strategies to mitigate them.

What are the key features of SIEM?

Modern SIEM systems are designed to meet different compliance requirements. Since the threat landscape is ever-changing, SIEM solutions must be capable of gathering data from different sources and formats and then analyzing them. Today, SIEM systems bring together the newest and most advanced technologies—Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning—to do this.

They usually include the following core features:

• Strong Data Architecture – These systems take advantage of data science algorithms to run speedy queries and visualizations. Log retention settings in modern SIEM systems help organizations retain data by specific source and log types for the necessary timeframes. Preventing the accumulation of unnecessary data is critical and SIEM systems can automatically purge unwanted logs.
• User and asset context enrichment – This covers aspects like identifying service accounts, tracking asset ownership, dynamic peer grouping, free threat intelligence integration and correlation, and being able to look up user login information, peer groups, and other critical information.
• Automated lateral movement tracking – More than 80% of cyber attacks involve lateral movement. Attackers typically gain unauthorized access, escalate privileges, and attempt to hijack high-level IP addresses and assets. Modern SIEM presents prebuilt incident timelines and a single pane of glass view for all available threat-related contexts. They ensure that security experts have enough information to spend sufficient time on investigations and acquire deep security domain expertise in the process.
• TDIR workflow automation – SIEM systems should enable threat response automation and centralize all security tools in one place. This includes response playbooks, codifying best responses to various threat types as part of their workflow automation practices.
• Noise reduction: This is a critical ability that will help the security experts recover control over the domain. The events with abnormal behaviors should be focused on and false-positives should be eliminated in modern SIEM systems. Delivery of efficient performance should be done while keeping down costs.
• Orchestration capabilities – Developers should be able to deploy pre-built connectors to their IT infrastructure without needing to manually script. The ability to add upgrades to your SIEM must be there. Users should be able to ensure a faster mean-time-to-resolution, push and pull data in and out of access management systems, and produce playbooks for junior analysts.

What is SOC?

A Security Operations Center (SOC) is a team of security experts in charge of overseeing all security operations within an organization. SOCs comprise various team members with designated roles such as:

• SOC manager
• Director of Incident Response
• Security analysts
• Security engineers
• Threat hunters
• Forensic investigators

There are other specialists included with these teams and each member may serve a specific purpose. More roles and team members may be added, depending on the size and business requirements of the organization. There are no hard-and-fast rules about how to create SOC teams, but the consensus is, that SOCs retrieve data from compromised systems for threat analysis. Automation security tools can be biased and have a varying margin of human error. SOC departments in companies fill in these gaps and contribute to achieving a holistic cyber security perspective.

What are the key features of SOC?

The following are the key features of SOC:

• At the minimum, the value of every type of digital asset should be reflected in a good SOC. It has to be prepared with the tools that will safeguard organizations against ransomware, malware, viruses, phishing, or other forms of cyber attacks. Modern SOCs may have an asset discovery solution within it in some cases.
• SOC teams should be in a position to come up with measures that ensure that there will be no disruption of business. One expects that productivity, as well as the number of revenues, should be increased and the rate of customer satisfaction should be optimized. This ensures that SOCs aid in the compliance of organizations with the regulated security standards on the most effective recording and logging of security incidents, responses, and events.
• SOC teams are also responsible for the day-to-day and or preventive Maintenance in various companies. They are expected to implement routine patching, software, and hardware annual upgrades, and always update firewalls. Powerful security policies and processes and appropriate backup are configured by them. Depending on them, they correctly delegate tasks and responsibilities to other people, including 24/7 security coverage of huge extended IT structures and cloud resources.
• Some SOCs deploy XDR technologies that extend log management and analysis to network events. They are used for developing security baselines and accepted normal behaviors. Organizations use them as reference points, which monitor suspicious activities, flag them, and ensure that their systems do not have viruses or malware strains going undetected for months or weeks.

7 Critical Differences between SIEM and SOC

#1 Monitoring and Analysis – SIEM systems are aimed at the collection, monitoring, and analysis of data sources for threats and a response to them. These offer threat identification in real-time, auto response to incidents, reporting, and analytical tools.

SOC solutions are more integrated and propose to oversee and coordinate the organization’s security. Some of the features that they include are threat detection, incident response, threat intelligence, vulnerability management, and security governance among others.

#2 Incident Handling vs Threat Hunting – SIEM offers the automatic feature for handling incidents while SOC offers the ability of manually process incidents through incident management and threat hunting.

#3 Threat Intelligence – On the aspect of threat intelligence, SIEM has minimal competence as compared to SOC which has a higher competence in threat intelligence, threat researching, and threat sharing.

#4 Vulnerability Assessments – In SIEM, there is almost no vulnerability management provided at all; In SOC, there are very comprehensive vulnerability management provided which also includes vulnerability scanning and patching management.

#5 Data Governance and Compliance – In terms of security governance, SIEM essentially lacks robust features although the SOC presents more sophisticated features of security governance by allowing the management of security policies as well as compliance.

#6 Reporting and Analytics – SIEM provides real-time reporting with analytics and similarly but in a more expanded manner SOC is advanced in reporting and analysis in terms of predictive analytics and threat modeling. While implementing automation in alerting and notification is done by SIEM, SOC offers alerting and notification with higher capabilities and includes the option to extend the alerting and notification rules.

#7 Security Design – By design, SIEM is horizontally oriented, SOC is vertically oriented, SIEM is designed to manage and coordinate overall security across the organization. SIEM and SOC differ in relation to their objectives, focus areas, scopes, and demands.

SIEM vs SOC: Key Differences

What are the key advantages of SIEM & SOC?

SOC can be considered as an additional service that provides support and enhances all robust security measures as provided by SIEM. Some SOC teams will offshore your security needs to a managed security service provider also referred to as MSSP.

The key advantages of combining SIEM and SOC are:

1. Possibility to constantly monitor, to deploy quickly, and easy servicing of different attack surfaces.
2. Audits are conducted by those tasked with the responsibility of running configuration checks for corresponding routines and maintenance activities
3. Suppression of false security alarms and data alerts
4. Firm’s ongoing compliance with various standards like HIPAA, SOC2, NIST, and others.
5. Maximization of resource procurement and distribution as a way of achieving enormous financial savings.
6. Monitors continuously identify potential threats and guarantee immediate responses and investigations.

What are the Key Limitations of SIEM & SOC?

1. While some SIEM tools use real-time data, others use log data which may be sometimes outdated or backdated. The end result is a sluggish reaction to security incidents; in other words, hackers have time on their hands to wreak havoc.
2. Most SOC teams lack manpower, funding, and technology to work; they are a rather resource-limited team. Almost all SIEM systems in the world are tasked with the role of detecting security-related incidents but oftentimes they are not well informed about the context around the particular security event that they investigate.
3. One of the most frequent drawbacks is that both SIEM and SOC systems cannot be connected to other security equipment and software; thus, they break silos and do not allow information sharing. Most SIEM and SOC systems monitor reactively against continuous monitoring, which might not provide real-time visibility into evolving security threats.

When to choose between SIEM and SOC?

You can go for SIEM if you require threat hunting at the most basic level and if your primary aim is to have efficient methods to identify and respond to threats. SIEM can’t do advanced vulnerability scanning; SOC involves real-time security sweep, security is present 24/7, and ‘the guys’ have a clue. But they are costly in terms of implementation and on the other side SIEM is relatively cheaper to implement. To be honest, if you are just getting into the world of security, getting started with SIEM is the perfect way to go. But for the organizations that are growing, it is advised to use SIEM in conjunction with a separate SOC team to get the best out of them.

SIEM vs SOC Use Cases

Following are the top SIEM vs SOC use cases for organizations:

• Companies can use SIEM to detect malware outbreaks and isolate impacted systems. SOC is best used for providing real-time monitoring, incident response, vulnerability management, and advanced threat detection.
• SIEM can help you meet various compliance standards like HIPAA, NIST, and PCI-DSS. SOC will focus more on data governance services and include risk assessments and security audits.
• SIEM can monitor and analyze cloud-based log data and detect security threats. SOC will provide cloud security services, including incident response management.
• SIEM can help you identify common threat trends by analyzing patterns and anomalies in log data. SOC will provide advanced analytics by leveraging AI and Machine Learning to detect unknown threats.

Choosing the Right Solution for Your Organization

Choosing between SOC vs SIEM will depend on various factors. Firstly, it depends on your budget and business requirements. Small organizations and startups don’t need to start with dedicated SOC teams. If you are looking for a basic security solution that will help you ensure compliance mandates, SIEM can be a better choice. SOC requires more team expertise, and investments, and takes a substantial amount of time to set up, in comparison to SIEM. However, the results are worth it. Ultimately, both solutions can be scaled up or down as per your changing requirements.

Conclusion

SIEM vs SOC answers different needs in companies.

SIEM is a technological solution for the collection, monitoring, and analysis of log data with the aim of detection and response against security incidents. On the other hand, SOC is a people-driven solution providing a team of security experts available 24/7 for monitoring and response against security incidents. The strengths and weaknesses of these different solutions are what make an organization decide on either one or both. Thus, the selection between SIEM and SOC will be based on security maturity, business requirements, and budget. If organizations choose the right solution, their security posture will be better as it will greatly reduce the risk of cyber-attacks and protect their valuable assets.

SIEM vs SOC FAQs

1. SIEM vs SOC – Which one of these is better for detecting and responding to security threats?

SIEM works well in detecting known threats and offers real-time incidence visibility, SOC identifies unknown threats and provides a human touch with expertise and oversight to security incident response.

2. Can SIEM and SOC be both used together?

Yes, many organizations choose to combine SIEM and SOC to design a robust cybersecurity strategy. It’s not uncommon these days as SIEM provides the necessary technologies to collect, analyze log data, and respond to security incidents. SOC is ideal for providing human expertise for managing various security tools and resources. SOC team members ensure that incidents are responded to appropriately and carry out the containment of threats.

3. How do I decide between SOC vs SIEM?

While this may be a little costlier for small-to-medium-sized organizations having limited security resources, SIEM is the cost-effective solution; if you have a large organization with a good level of security maturity, consider SOC.

4. Can I set up SIEM and SOC myself, or do I need to contract third-party services?

Both SIEM and SOC can be implemented on your own, but setting up the necessary resources and expertise could be really overwhelming. Outsourcing to a third-party provider can be an excellent option in the event that you do not have the resources or expertise to implement and maintain SIEM and SOC by yourself.