The SOC manager of 2030: Pave the future of cybersecurity

Have you ever thought about what the future holds? Some may call it being anxious, others say it's being future-oriented. Being aware and prepared for the future can help your team in the long run. As we look forward to the year 2030, your SOC team's technology and processes are bound to undergo significant changes.

Technology is one of the key aspects of any SOC team and a SIEM is an invaluable tool. SIEMs have evolved substantially since they first came out in 2005. For nearly two decades, organizations have leveraged their SIEM solutions to detect and mitigate cyberattacks. However, at the same time, attackers have also evolved. Cybercriminals have always innovated to bypass SIEM controls and other defense mechanisms.

Today, let's take a glimpse into the potential future of a SOC team and SIEM solutions. Also, we welcome you to become part of this revolutionary journey with your ideas. In this article we'll explore:

• The current position of SOC
• The future of SOC
• Shape the future: What do you think?

The current position of SOC

SOC teams currently leverage various technologies to achieve their goals. SIEM is one such tech that acts as a lifesaver for organizations by helping them reduce false positives, adhere to compliance mandates, and save costs. Let's explore how today's SOC utilizes the capabilities of an effective SIEM solution.

SOAR: Your team can use a SIEM with SOAR capabilities to help your team prioritize their time effectively. Security orchestration and automation allows your analysts to automate redundant tasks through predefined workflows and automatic ticket assignments, allowing them to focus on important incidents.This capability increases the efficiency and effectiveness of your team.

UEBA: Insider sabotage is becoming more prominent. As a SOC manager, you need to be aware of the count, time, and pattern anomalies within the organization. UEBA ensures the safety of both your client and employee data by analyzing dynamic behavioral baselines and risk scores. Anomalous activity will never go undetected in your network again with UEBA.

Compliance management: Stringent data privacy mandates from various governments are making organizational survival increasingly difficult. A compliance breach can cost your company millions of dollars and it's your responsibility to stop such mistakes. An effective SIEM solution will contain audit-ready templates of all the prominent mandates like GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and more to uplift your team's capabilities. The solution can also provide secure log archival for future requirements and forensic analysis.

CASB: Every organization has both sanctioned and unsanctioned applications. It is impossible for your team to detect the use of every unsanctioned application manually, unless you have this capability. A CASB allows for the effective protection and monitoring of cloud-based applications, web content filtering, and shadow IT monitoring. A CASB gives analysts in-depth reports on both in-bound and out-bound traffic to cloud applications, thereby reducing the risk of a potential breach.

Threat intelligence: An intelligent SIEM solution will help your team to utilize threat feeds, block malicious intruders, and proactively hunt for threat actors. Threat intelligence also provides real-time alerts on communication with blacklisted IPs, domains, URLs, and more, so that the organization is safe from known threats.

The future of SOC

Attack detection, data loss prevention, and real-time security analytics are also capabilities used by today's SOC teams. But times are always changing, shouldn't you think about the new capabilities that your team could adopt? Attackers are constantly upgrading their techniques and it's essential to maintain pace. Now, let's look into how SOCs and SIEM solutions will potentially evolve and perform by 2030.

Enhanced automation and AI-driven threat hunting: AI has evolved at an abnormal rate over the past years and we're yet to see its full potential.The solutions we currently have wields the power to achieve a certain level of automation, but by 2030, it is expected that technology will be backed by a different level of evolved AI and ML. This will allow for extensive automated threat hunting, anomaly detection, and incident response, all with minimal human interference. This will allow your team to focus and tackle critical incidents.

Quantum-safe encryption and post-quantum threat detection: Currently, quantum computers are not a widely accessible tool and is still in development. However, a fully-equipped quantum computer has the potential to break the cryptographic mechanism which is followed in the security, banking, and insurance industries, along with the public sector. The future SIEM should and will be equipped with quantum-safe cryptography. Also, the future SIEM should be able to defend against quantum-computing enabled attacks by threat actors. Adopting this technology will allow your team to reduce the risk of potential breaches caused by quantum-enabled attackers.

Quantum threat hunting: As mentioned above, quantum computing can enable fatal threats. Currently, SOCs utilize SIEM solutions to conduct threat detection based on known patterns and threats. The future SOCs should be able to leverage quantum computing capabilities to improve detection and response capabilities. This level of computing should allow SIEM solutions to process vast amounts of data and execute intricate algorithms that could revolutionize the accuracy and efficiency of anomaly detection and pattern recognition. This capability can benefit your team in the drastic reduction of false-positives.

Blockchain and distributed ledger technology: SOCs, using the current SIEM solutions, store data in a central manner making it susceptible to threat actors. By leveraging distributed ledger technology or blockchain, SIEM solutions should be able to create transparent, secure, and tamper-proof logs. Your team can increase the integrity of log data and make it more difficult for threat actors to modify or delete log data.

Virtual reality and augmented reality interfaces: SOCs now utilize 2D dashboards for data visualization and processing. The future should utilize virtual and augmented reality to allow analysts to explore threat landscapes in 3D. This will help your team improve attack visualization and make incident response mechanisms more intuitive.

Multi-level user verification: Today, SOCs primarily rely on user credentials and multi-factor authentication for verifying user's identity. The authentication measures of the future SIEM technology is expected to be more rigorous by including voice and facial recognition, behavioral biometrics, retina scans, and much more. This will ensure that within your organization, only the right users get access to secure information.

Integration with emerging future technology: Current solutions are already capable of integrating with emerging technologies such as IoT devices and cloud applications. However, future technologies should implement different levels of advancements such as: 6G networks, quantum computers, edge computing, advanced IoT devices, and more.

Conclusion

The security industry owes a lot to solutions such as SIEM, which has helped detect and overcome hefty hurdles. SOCs reliant on SIEM should realize the potential and unleash all its capabilities. However, it is vital to keep up with the rate at which attackers are advancing.

The SOC of 2030 is a strategic asset to tackle the evolving and complex cybersecurity threat landscape. SOCs across the globe will eventually rely on advanced SIEM solutions as a beacon of hope and resilience. Analyzing today's context, features like UEBA, CASB and SOAR are advanced SIEM capabilities which most overlook. ManageEngine's Log360 contains all these capabilities and more, and is headed to become the best SIEM of the future. What are you waiting for? Sign up for a personalized demo now.