The Crucial Role of Real-time Analytics in Modern SOCs

In today's dynamic cybersecurity landscape, business continuity and outcomes depend heavily on an organization’s security posture and ability to detect and mitigate cyber threats.  Security Operations Centers (SOCs) play an essential role in an organization's security strategy across various industries and scales.  

Sometimes, security controls are not operational 24/7, leading to undetected vulnerabilities. A lack of in-depth expertise, with analysts who may not be well-versed in advanced technologies and tools, poses a significant concern. Many of these challenges of SOCs can be effectively addressed with real-time analytics tools. Research shows a majority of organizations are showing an increase in revenue due to real-time analytics which is the process of collecting, analyzing, and leveraging data in real time to make informed decisions.  

The Importance of Real-time Analytics

In today's rapidly evolving business ecosystem, legacy data processing tools and methodologies are inadequate, and unable to keep pace with the dynamic environment. Traditional analytics tools contribute to a data gap, as they analyze data with a delay and add further waiting time for data arrival. This delay hampers decision-making, resulting in lost time and revenue for businesses.

Real-time analytics tools, on the other hand, effectively address this challenge. These tools are software applications designed to process and analyze data the moment it is generated, in real-time. This immediate processing allows for the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, providing valuable insights that empower organizations to make quick informed decisions. Within SOCs, real-time analytics supports continuous monitoring of solutions, applications, security, and user interactions. These tools help the analysts to mitigate attacks as and when they occur by analyzing event logs immediately after they are created, where large amounts of data are captured over a short period.

The Key Advantages of Real-time Analytics in SOCs

Real-time analytics tools offer numerous benefits for organizations, serving diverse purposes. Some of the key advantages are captured in this article.

Reduction in Threat Detection and Response Times

Speed is crucial in resolving security breaches or performance degradations within any SOC. Data breaches can become an even more costly issue when there are delays in their detection, especially with traditional tools where it takes 280 days on an average to detect a breach in the absence of real-time analytics.  However, this can be reduced to under 100 days with effective real-time monitoring and response systems.  

SOCs can depend on real-time analytics to sift through massive volumes of log data, gather threat intelligence, and automate threat detection and response, such as blocking malicious IP addresses. Automated incident response tools provide security teams with visibility into only relevant and actionable alerts, suppressing the benign ones. This swift response capability reduces downtime and mitigates the impact of incidents on organizational operations.

Improved Incident Management

Security analysts often spend considerable time manually correlating diverse data sources to understand the context of specific alerts. This process leads to inefficiency, as they must scan various sources, determine if an alert is genuine or a false positive, assess its priority, and evaluate its potential impact on the organization. This tedious and lengthy process can lead to analyst burnout, negatively impacting SOC performance. However, real-time analytics can enable SOCs to handle up to 50% more incidents per analyst, significantly improving their efficiency.

Lesser Security Events

Traditional Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems in SOCs struggle to effectively track and analyze sophisticated cybersecurity threats. These legacy systems often burden SOC teams with false positives and negatives. Their generalized approach to analytics can create vulnerabilities and strain SOC resources, requiring additional staff to address even a single false positive. In contrast, real-time analytics or analytics-driven SIEMs offer superior context for security alerts, sending only genuine threats to security teams. By implementing real-time analytics, SOCs can reduce false positives by up to 20%, allowing security experts to focus on genuine alerts and use their time more efficiently.

Enhanced Threat Intelligence

Staying ahead of potential threats is crucial for organizations in today's landscape. Real-time threat intelligence plays a vital role in proactively detecting threats. Through continuous monitoring of various threat vectors, it can identify and stop suspicious activities or anomalies before they cause harm. Additionally, real-time threat intelligence enhances threat-hunting capabilities by providing the latest information on emerging threats, thereby closing security gaps. Real-time analytics contributes to a 30% increase in the accuracy and relevance of threat intelligence, enabling faster adaptation to new and evolving threats.

Increased operational efficiency

By applying real-time analytics, SOCs can swiftly and effortlessly uncover risks and detect suspicious activities that might indicate potential security breaches. Real-time data collection and analysis enable optimal resource allocation within the SOC, providing teams with critical insights for informed strategic decisions. This leads to optimized processes, eliminating inefficiencies and improving productivity. SOCs utilizing real-time analytics solutions report a 35% improvement in overall operational efficiency and faster incident resolution times.

Better Compliance and Reporting 

Organizations must adhere to various cybersecurity regulations. By implementing real-time analytics, SOCs can automate the monitoring and reporting of security controls and policy violations. This enables the generation of accurate reports, saving time and effort while ensuring compliance with data privacy laws. Real-time analytics also facilitates the creation of checklists based on the latest regulations, ensuring all compliance requirements are met. By automating reporting, real-time analytics can reduce the time spent on compliance reporting by up to 60%.

Leveraging real-time analytics in SOCs is essential in today's cybersecurity landscape to address the rapid escalation of cyber threats and their potential impact. By addressing threats in real-time, organizations can stay one step ahead, maintaining robust security postures and mitigating risks efficiently.

Authored by Mukul Kulshrestha, Vice President - Cyber Security, Inspira Enterprise