The True Cost of an In-House Security Operations Center (SOC)>
Atlanta News – Lana Vrz
Building an internal Security Operations Center (SOC) involves significant costs in terms of staffing, technology infrastructure, facility expenses, and management overhead, with estimates ranging from $2-4 million annually.
Building an internal Security Operations Center (SOC) involves significant costs in terms of staffing, technology infrastructure, facility expenses, and management overhead, with estimates ranging from $2-4 million annually.
Building an internal Security Operations Center (SOC) involves various major expenses, estimated between $2-4 million annually.
These costs encompass the following key areas:
1) **Security Analyst Salaries**: Running a 24/7 SOC necessitates maintaining 8-12 analysts working in rotating shifts at competitive cybersecurity pay rates.
2) **Management/Supervision**: Besides the basic security analysts, additional leadership roles such as a SOC manager, threat intel director, and other specialized positions contribute to the overall costs.
3) **Technology Infrastructure**: Significant expenditures are required for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), endpoint detection, firewalls, Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS), and maintaining these core SOC systems.
4) **Facility Costs**: Dedicated real estate, power redundancy, and other facility considerations need to be factored in for the SOC team’s operations center.
5) **Tool Licenses**: Subscriptions and licenses for security platforms from providers like Splunk or Palo Alto Networks also add to the overall costs.
6) **False Positives**: Alert fatigue from managing false positives reduces analyst productivity and effectiveness.
Addressing this issue requires additional tools and processes.
7) **Training**: Ongoing training on new threats and proficiency in security tools is essential.
Avoiding analysts from falling behind in emerging attacks adds to the training budget.
The combination of these numerous costs results in substantial outlays before an internal SOC becomes operational.
Additionally, scaling up staffing or technology becomes costly due to the fixed overhead.
Outsourcing to a SOC-as-a-Service provider leads to significant cost reduction compared to running an in-house team.
The lack of overhead for staffing, tools, and facilities accounts for much of the savings.
It also eliminates the expense associated with alert fatigue and the hidden costs of employee turnover.
Link: https://www.atlnightspots.com/true-cost-of-soc/