SOC automation offers many benefits. It facilitates faster response times, ensures consistency across security policies and responses, reduces SOC analyst alert fatigue, helps maintain compliance with industry regulations, and more. But automating a SOC is easier said than done—an expensive, time-consuming process riddled with obstacles.
There are two schools of thought about SOC automation. Organizations can either do it themselves—a process known as homegrown SOC automation—or purchase a ready-made security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solution. While an out-of-the-box SOAR solution is undoubtedly the more straightforward option, homegrown SOC automation offers far greater customization, control, and opportunities for cost savings.
This article will explore the benefits, challenges, and best practices of homegrown SOC automation to help you make a more informed decision between the two.
The Benefits of Homegrown SOC Automation
While developing it is a complex process, homegrown SOC automation offers significant benefits.
Customization
The most apparent benefit of homegrown SOC automation is that you can design your solution to meet your specific needs. Whereas commercial SOAR solutions are inherently more generalized and unlikely to meet any particular organization’s exact needs, security teams can ensure homegrown solutions fit seamlessly with existing workflows, tools, and security policies. Moreover, homegrown SOC automation offers significant flexibility, allowing organizations to adapt and modify the solution as their needs change or the business scales up or down.
Control
Control is another significant benefit of homegrown SOC automation. Security teams are beholden to no one and can exert complete control over the solution's design, implementation, and maintenance. While this approach takes considerable effort, security issues avoid potential issues with vendor lock-in, like price increases, discontinued support, or forced upgrades.
Integration
Off-tlf SOAR solutions often have integration issues, especially with legacy tools, which can lead to efficiency and visibility issues. Security teams can, however, design homegrown SOC automation to integrate seamlessly with even the most complex, outdated, or siloed tools or systems.
Cost Efficiency
While initial development costs will be high, homegrown SOC automation is the more cost-effective solution in the long term, especially for organizations with unique needs requiring extensive SOAR customization. Similarly, while initial investment costs will be comprehensive, maintenance costs will be lower than paying a subscription to a SOAR provider.
The Challenges of Homegrown SOC Automation
However, it’s essential to recognize that homegrown SOC automation is a difficult task with several unignorable challenges.
Development Complexity
Developing a homegrown SOC automation process requires significant resources, including skilled developers, cybersecurity experts, and maintenance personnel. Considering most organizations consider SOC automation to reduce the burden on security staff, they may not have the human resources necessary to design homegrown SOC automation.
Similarly, it takes considerable time to develop and deploy a homegrown SOC automation solution—especially compared to an out-of-the-box SOAR solution, which would be ready immediately. If you choose a homegrown approach to SOC automation, you must accept that the benefits of automation will not be immediate.
Maintenance and Updates
It’s equally important to recognize that the resource-intensive nature of homegrown SOC automation does not end at deployment: security teams must conduct regular updates, patches, and feature enhancements to keep the system effective against evolving threats. Moreover, although homegrown SOC automation facilitates greater scalability, this process is also challenging, labor-intensive, and may even require substantial re-design.
Risk of Technical Debt
In time, the custom codebase may also become complex and challenging to manage, resulting in technical debt that makes the system harder to maintain and update. Minor changes or fixes may eventually require significant effort, slowing development and making the system more prone to errors or vulnerabilities.
Homegrown SOC Automation Best Practices
By this point, you should know better whether homegrown SOC automation is for you. If you have decided to design your own SOC automation solution, here are a few best practices to help you develop, maintain, and scale your solution.
Development
Modular Architecture: Design the solution modularly, where different components can be independently developed, tested, and maintained to facilitate easy updates and scalability.
Coding Standards: Implementing and enforcing coding standards and best practices will ensure consistency across the codebase, making it more maintainable and reducing the risk of technical debt.
Comprehensive Documentation: Maintain thorough documentation of the system’s architecture, code, and processes to aid onboarding and future development efforts.
Maintenance
· Regular Refactoring: Continuously refactor the code to eliminate inefficiencies, outdated patterns, and redundant components. This helps keep the codebase clean and manageable.
· Automated Testing: Incorporate automated testing to detect issues early and ensure new changes do not introduce vulnerabilities.
· Continuous Monitoring: Implement monitoring to track the system’s performance, detect anomalies, and proactively address potential issues.
Scaling
· Scalable Infrastructure: Use scalable infrastructure, such as cloud-based services, to handle growing data volumes and increased processing demands.
· Capacity Planning: Regularly assess system capacity and plan for expansion to accommodate organizational growth.
· Microservices: Consider a microservices architecture to enable horizontal scaling, allowing components to be scaled independently as needed.
Conclusion
As threats grow more frequent and sophisticated, security environments become increasingly complex, and security teams are stretched thinner than ever, SOC automation has become a business necessity. But is a homegrown SOC automation solution right for your organization? Do you have the resources, technical expertise, and time necessary to design a homegrown SOC automation solution? Hopefully this article will help you answer for yourself.
