Skills and Challenges in SOC
Interview with Elad Ortiz

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In working in fields such as cybersecurity and data engineering, it is vital to consider the necessary skills and challenges presented in providing quality security measures. Elad Ortiz, a SIEM integration engineer, discusses his perspective on practices applied to maintain high quality cybersecurity practices.
One of the main challenges this field faces is finding skilled and dedicated workers; quality cybersecurity is a 24-hour job, and locating companies that respect and reward their security operation workers appropriately can be a task in itself. Building expert foundational knowledge can be difficult - a company must be prepared to take on the financial burden of training new employees, which can be time consuming. According to ISACA research, 32% of organizations say filling a position takes six months.
Companies may provide a more respectful work environment and implement beneficial practices to motivate employees and decrease turnover rates, such as providing more learning opportunities. Enhancing employees' work ethic can be done through encouraging external self-education and rewarding improved practice - a proactive workplace leads to higher pay, respect and positive outcomes for everyone.
To provide optimized cybersecurity operation centers, there are a few necessary technical and non-technical skills to look for in employees. From a technical perspective, basic knowledge of programming languages are vital for implementing quality security measures. Experts suggest the use of flow rules, such as Yara, can decrease the amount of false positive detections and assist SIEMs in in locating undetected events.
From a non-technical perspective, SOC technologies benefit from workers that can employ flexibility in practice and adopt new devices regularly. Creativity is also helpful in creating awareness of new monitoring gaps and developing defense methods in response. Finally, employee curiosity and motivation is a driving force behind creating new cybersecurity measures.
A Ponemon Institute Report suggests that cyber crime drains $11.7 million per business annually, up 62 percent in five years. To see increased organizational resilience and budgeting, tune into your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools, which can provide insight into correlated events and incident documentation. This also allows companies to see financial burdens and categorize guidelines by severity for Key Risk Indicator (KRI) reports, providing upper management with up-to-date security statuses.
Creating a strong relationship with your networking and system administration teams can optimize work flow and maintain high levels of quality for both employees and the company. All of these steps can contribute to an overall understanding of the value of cybersecurity and hopefully, an increased budget, which promotes quality protection and employee motivation.

Organizations that are able to take a full advantage of their Security Services benefit from greater business value. They are able to identify risks early, prioritize those risks in alignment with business goals, mitigate risks at a faster speed. As a result, they are able to achieve improved operational resilience and business continuity. Scale and sustain the resources that you already have - it's part of an agile and integrated risk management strategy. We help transform your risk management by improving your security efficiency.
Quantum Cybersecurity Skills has been co-founded by seasoned SOC Managers to help SOC Managers and CISOs out there. We are your trusted Partner to deliver continuous SOC productivity optimization aligned to ISO 27001 PDCA, proactive and reactive security services, MDR and professional risk mitigation services. Our services are applicable to any size organization from any industry, whether with an in-house SOC / CSIRT / CERT or MSSP outsourced. We run operations in UK, Canada, Mexico, USA and Spain to meet customers' Data Privacy requirements.
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