What Does SecOps Do?
A SecOps team is responsible for defending the organization against cyber threats. Often, companies have security and operations teams that work separately but have overlapping responsibilities. For example, the security team is responsible for cybersecurity, while the operations team focuses on maintaining and streamlining operations. Since cyberattacks pose a threat to operations, these two areas of expertise overlap significantly.
A SecOps team operates at the core of the corporate Security Operations Center (SOC). It is responsible for managing an organization’s cyber defenses. This includes both proactively taking steps to prevent cyberattacks and working to detect, mitigate, and recover from ongoing ones.
SecOps vs. SOC
The SecOps team and the SOC are both tasked with protecting the organization against cyberattacks. However, these are not competing or even independent organizations.
The SecOps team is central to the operations of the SOC. Typically, a SOC is considered to include the people, processes, and tools used to defend the organization against cyber threats. The SecOps team is the people who accomplish this goal.
Therefore, a SecOps team is a subset of the corporate SOC. Beyond the SecOps team, the SOC includes processes and tools. It may also include team members who are not a part of the rapid-response SecOps team.
DevSecOps vs. SecOps
SecOps and DevSecOps are both designed to improve an organization’s resiliency against cyber threats. However, they accomplish this in different ways, have different areas of focus, and operate in different parts of the organization.
The SecOps team is primarily focused on protecting the organization against threats to its production systems and infrastructure. These systems are exposed to potential threats and are vital to the functioning of the organization. Preventing, identifying, blocking, and remediating these active attacks is the job of the SecOps team.
A DevSecOps initiative, on the other hand, is more proactive and preventative than reactive. It operates largely within the development team and attempts to identify and correct vulnerabilities before they pose a risk to the organization. For example, a DevSecOps process may include performing vulnerability scanning on software during the development process so issues could be found and fixed before the software is released. In contrast, a SecOps team may come into the picture when that software is live in an organization’s production environment, and the corporate SOC needs to identify and respond to attempts by cyber threat actors to exploit vulnerabilities that slipped through to production.
In the end, SecOps and DevSecOps are both attempting to accomplish the same goal and may use some of the same tools and techniques. However, DevSecOps typically falls earlier in software’s lifecycle, and a DevSecOps team is focused on vulnerabilities in corporate software rather than the complete range of attacks that an organization may face.
SecOps with Check Point Infinity
A SecOps team is typically a small group that operates out of a SOC and is responsible for protecting the organization against a wide range of potential threats. As corporate IT infrastructures grow more complex and companies face more sophisticated cyber threats, SecOps teams may struggle to keep up with their expanding responsibilities.
For SecOps teams to operate and scale effectively, they need access to the right tools. If security team members need to manually aggregate data from multiple sources, perform analyses, and context-switch between various dashboards, they will never be able to keep up with the evolving threat landscape.
A modern SOC and SecOps team requires an integrated security architecture. By placing all of the data and functionality that SecOps teams need in a single tool supported by security automation, an organization enables them to focus their attention and efforts where they can do the greatest good for the organization.
Check Point Infinity SOC provides SecOps teams with the tools and capabilities that they need to secure and support the organization. Infinity SOC provides near-zero false positives and enables SecOps teams to rapidly investigate potential threats and take action to block or remediate them. To learn more about how Infinity SOC can enhance your organization’s SecOps program, check out this demo video.
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