What Can a Secure Operations Center Do for You?

By: Marco
October 12, 2017

Security threats are rising with an increasing emphasis on smaller businesses. Hackers see them as easy targets and gateways to larger businesses. The famous attack on Target in 2013 was actually through one of their small vendors.

At Marco, we’re helping businesses protect themselves and fight against attacks – 24 hours a day. We built a Secure Operations Center that is fully staffed to protect primarily our Managed WAN clients. 

Secure Operations Centers, or SOC for short, are changing the security landscape today by remediating security vulnerabilities and reducing an organization’s exposure to hacks. They are typically located in nondescript facilities. Inside, the network security staff monitors, analyzes and actively manages the security of an organization’s network using data collection appliances, also known as DCAs.

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The concept is not new. I did something similar early in my career. But at that time, it was limited to government agencies and large enterprises that had the resources and highly skilled manpower to execute. 

Now smaller organizations are gaining access to the technology and personnel to more effectively protect themselves from attacks. Here’s a look at some of the key functions of a Secure Operations Center:

  • Active Network Scanning
    Actively probe hosts use network traffic to elicit a response and analyze these responses to determine the presence of a vulnerability. Examples of potential vulnerabilities include unpatched software or misconfigurations.

  • Host-based Assessment
    With specialized software, we can perform a more accurate and comprehensive detection of vulnerabilities. We inspect installed software and continuously compare it against a list of known vulnerable software.

  • Behavioral Monitoring
    At its most basic level, effective cyber security monitoring comes down to exception management. It is critical to keep looking for activities that represent exceptions to the norm within the organization. This could be policy violations, error messages, spikes in outbound network activity or unexpected reboots.

  • Security Information and Event Management
    There’s lot of data coming in and out every day. What does it all mean? What can it tell us? With the assistance of SIEM tools, we can find the latest threats by applying dynamic correlation rules against the mountain of disparate and varied event log data.


Given the prevalence and pervasiveness of security attacks, it’s highly likely that your organization will be compromised. It may have been already. The threats will continue to rise. But we can stay one step ahead with specialized tools and security engineers and analysts focused on detecting and remediating threats immediately. Every day, we prevent hundreds of attacks from causing damage to organizations – before they ever impact our clients or their users.

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Topics: Security