SOC (Security Operations Centre)
A SOC (Security Operations Centre) is the organisational function responsible for defending an infrastructure against security threats through continuous monitoring, alert triage, incident investigation, and coordinated response. It is not a single product: it is the combination of people (security analysts operating in tiered roles), processes (runbooks, escalation paths, incident classification, post-incident review), and technology (primarily a SIEM for detection and visibility, a SOAR platform for orchestration and actuation, EDR agents, vulnerability scanners, threat intelligence feeds, and ticketing or case management systems). The SOC’s purpose is to close the loop between something going wrong in the infrastructure and someone doing something about it — with enough structure that the response is consistent, attributable, and auditable regardless of which analyst is on shift. Operating models range from a fully internal 24×7 team, through a virtual SOC (vSOC) sharing analysts across business units, to an outsourced MDR (Managed Detection and Response) or MSSP engagement where a third party operates the SIEM and initial triage on the organisation’s behalf; the technology stack is largely the same across models, but the boundary of who performs each tier of work changes. Analyst tiers are conventionally structured as L1 (alert triage, false-positive filtering, initial enrichment, escalation decisions), L2 (deeper investigation, correlation across data sources, containment recommendations), and L3 (threat hunting, malware reverse engineering, incident lead, playbook authoring, purple-team exercises) — with escalation governed by severity classification (P1–P4 or equivalent), SLA targets for MTTD (Mean Time to Detect) and MTTR (Mean Time to Respond), and documented runbooks that define what each tier may do autonomously versus what requires approval.