SOCaaS Metrics: Evaluating The Effectiveness of Your Service
Companies increasingly rely on service-based models like SOC as a Service (SOCaaS) to manage important aspects of business operations. While SOCaaS offers scalability, cost efficiency, and access to specialized expertise vs in-house security operations, you can’t take its effectiveness for granted. Measuring relevant SOCaaS metrics is crucial to ensure that the service delivers the expected value and meets your company’s security goals.
SOCaaS Metrics
Measuring the effectiveness of SOCaaS is not just about monitoring how quickly incidents are detected or resolved but also about evaluating how the service improves your overall security posture, minimizes risks, and enhances operational efficiency. Here are some numbers worth looking at.
False positive rate
Businesses waste a lot of time investigating false positive security alerts. One report found that up to 20 percent of all alerts are false positives. One big attraction of the SOCaaS model is that your business gets a team of experts who can triage alerts and help cut through the noise to reduce false positives. False positives often overload security teams with unnecessary work, leading to inefficiency and potential alert fatigue.
Naturally, then a good metric for assessing the usefulness of a SOCaaS service is the proportion of security alerts generated by the SOCaaS that turn out to be benign or non-malicious. SOCaaS providers need to fine-tune their detection systems and threat intelligence mechanisms to ensure that the alerts they raise are accurate and meaningful for your business. A well-calibrated SOCaaS platform will reduce false positives through techniques like context-aware alerting and improved correlation of events across multiple sources. Closely monitor this rate and see how it changes over time.
False negative rate
A lot gets spoken about in cybersecurity about false positives, but it’s worth noting that false negatives are perhaps even more alarming when assessing the value of a SOCaaS provider. This metric tracks the percentage of legitimate threats that the SOCaaS provider fails to detect. A high rate indicates that threats slip through undetected, which could lead to significant damage or breaches.
SOCaaS providers need robust detection mechanisms in place, using threat intelligence feeds, anomaly detection, and behavior analytics to capture even sophisticated attacks. After all, the whole point of using the service is to get a team of expert analysts who monitor your environment and uncover attacks. Monitoring this metric helps ensure that the SOCaaS service effectively protects your business in the most fundamental way.
Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)
MTTD measures how quickly the SOCaaS provider identifies a security incident after it occurs. This metric is crucial because the longer a threat remains undetected, the more damage it can inflict on your system or network. SOCaaS providers typically offer around-the-clock monitoring and use advanced threat detection tools to continuously analyze data from endpoints, network devices, and applications.
A low MTTD suggests that the service does well at finding anomalies or suspicious activity early, which gives you more time to act. Track how MTTD evolves over time, especially after implementing SOCaaS, to ensure continuous improvement in threat detection.
Compliance adherence
While the value of SOCaaS is more about maintaining vigilance over your IT environment to find threats, it’s important that outsourcing your security operations doesn’t lead to compliance gaps. That’s why it’s vital to measure how well the SOCaaS provider helps your organization meet regulatory and industry standards like GDPR, DORA, or PCI-DSS. If using SOCaaS brings you out of compliance, it’s important to address this quickly.
Staying compliant is essential to avoid fines and preserve the trust of customers/suppliers. Compliance adherence is, of course, quite a broad, non-specific term. However, there are valuable metrics that help measure compliance adherence. One example is The Supplier Performance Risk System (SPRS) score in the USA, which assesses how well an organization implements the 110 security controls specified by NIST 800-171. For GDPR, you will have to be more creative and measure certain numbers as proxies for signifying compliance, such as the time taken to detect a data breach and the time taken to notify the relevant supervisory authority.
Security maturity change
SOCaaS providers should contribute to the development of a more mature security posture for your business, which includes better policies, stronger incident response processes, and the ability to handle more advanced threats. What you want is to evolve from basic threat detection to a more proactive and comprehensive security strategy. A good SOCaaS provider should help you grow in your security efforts.
Security maturity growth can seem vague unless it’s tied to specific frameworks and measurable benchmarks. To get more specific, map your progress against the phases of maturity in recognized cybersecurity frameworks. Various well-known examples of cybersecurity maturity models define clear stages of security progression that you can use as a reference, such as NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) or Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model (C2M2). In Germany, the IT-Grundschutz Methodology includes a maturity model for developing information security capabilities.
Using clear, actionable metrics to measure the effectiveness of SOCaaS is essential for ensuring that it enhances rather than weakens your security strategy. While the reduction in operational costs and saving large upfront investments are obvious allures of SOCaaS, companies need to ensure that SOCaaS actively strengthens their security posture by improving threat detection, maintaining compliance, and increasing security maturity.
DIESEC’s SOCaaS solution contributes to your company’s long-term risk management and overall business resilience. We give you network monitoring, threat detection, compliance, reporting and 24/7 support.