ROC-n-SOC: Creating Risk Operations Centers to Support SOCs

Although the cybersecurity risk landscape has always been dynamic, the shift to remote work during the pandemic further accelerated massive changes and affected how an enterprise focuses on risk and security services. In a pre-COVID survey by Harvard Business Review, survey respondents were asked what the CISO/cybersecurity leader’s principal responsibilities should be in the next three years. 63% responded that they wanted to build an organization-wide cybersecurity culture. 47% responded they wanted to work with the risk management function to integrate cyber risk with a broader risk strategy. 

Digital transformation has been in most business leaders’ minds for a while, but this focus on cyber practices and cyber risk is relatively new. Historically, security operations center’s (SOC’s) have been responsible for monitoring and responding to risk and defending the enterprise against attack. At its core, a SOC system is a reactive approach to cybersecurity that waits for threats to appear before dealing with them, instead of anticipating where the threats will originate. The current SOC model also doesn’t support a way to effectively communicate threats or vulnerabilities to management or boardrooms. 

ROC’s vs. SOC’s

Risk assessments to determine threats and vulnerabilities are typically conducted at intervals, whether it be once a year or every other year. Outside of this, most security professionals only respond to risk when a breach is detected, or a customer’s information has already been compromised. The downfall of this approach is that it doesn’t account for the continuous, ever-changing nature of risk. This irregular assessment audit schedule leaves institutions continuously exposed to threats, especially since many cybersecurity programs are already underfunded and understaffed.

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The C-suite is good at making decisions based upon risk. Still, cybersecurity risk hardly ever gets communicated in a business context that encourages a narrative to get technical teams and executives on the same page regarding risk management. As the rise of digital transformation proliferates across the globe, cybersecurity initiatives that were once seen as a “nice to have” are becoming a “need to have” as the probability of threats rise in growing digital spaces. Information is the new currency, and customers put their trust in an organization’s security intelligence to keep them safe. When their data is compromised, so is that trust, and that affects every organization’s bottom line.

So in comes risk operation center’s (ROC’s). Unlike the SOC, which takes a more reactive approach to cybersecurity, the ROC encompasses cyber and IT, focusing on proactive risk management, working with the SOC to analyze past vulnerabilities and improve mitigation. It can also be supported by technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to eliminate the need for human intervention in compliance and risk assessments. ROC supplemented with ML offers a broader monitoring solution with the ability to anticipate more vulnerabilities.

The Impact of ROC’s

ROC’s allow for the identification of the risks and provide risk intelligence and strategic insight. They also give security leaders the ability to collaborate between the very technical aspects of cyber risk management and business stakeholders. This isn’t feasible for a SOC team because they’re reactive by nature. Instead, they constantly respond to vulnerability concerns and are “n the weeds, trying to mitigate active threats instead of anticipating them.

The ROC measures impact, likelihood, and tracks trending risks that CISO’s can bring to the board or other executive members. Risk visualizations—which are often both quantitative and qualitative–can be essential to ground a discussion around risk exposure. Understanding risk and the factors that go into assessing it is made much more intuitive through graphics that allow comparison and a quick analysis of financial vulnerabilities. Risk visuals are essential to get to the “big picture” on where the company stands in its cyber risk posture. Platforms like CyberStrong can also present data analytics by vulnerability type and approach for remediation.

A permanent ROC can also be supplemented by NLP-assisted threat monitoring that continuously assesses an enterprise’s assets and is ready to proactively react to cyber-attacks. Organizations that wait to establish a risk operations center after a breach or after an event has already occurred will lose key data on risk intelligence and the opportunity to make effective decisions based on real-time information.

Risk insights with a balance of quantitative and qualitative information are used for risk storytelling and communication, encouraging a cyber and risk-aware culture.

Conclusion

Keeping up with the dynamic landscape of risk management and global security in a post-COVID-19 era requires more than GRC legacy systems. Organizations need an agile, responsive solution that monitors, alerts, and responds to threats, not modular solutions that do not grow with the organization. It’s no longer enough to meet bare minimum compliance requirements. Enterprises need to create a system and a culture that act proactively on threat intelligence and effectively mitigate possible disruption.

For automation solutions and more on how CyberStrong can give you and your employee’s the ability to help transition your team to a ROC, contact us here. You can also register and watch our webinar about ROC-n-SOCs here.