How to Transform Your Security Operations Centre to Beat Cyberthreats

Modern cybersecurity teams constantly strive to catch and remediate cyberthreats before they cause damage. But with the rise in digital adoption in Canada, changing work habits and an insidious threat landscape, ensuring proactive security has become a challenge.

CDW’s Canadian Cybersecurity Study estimated that in 2024, 9 to 10 percent of all attacks became cyberincidents, up from 7 to 8 percent in 2023, which signals the rise in sophisticated threats with a higher ‘hit rate.’

To overcome such threats, IT directors and CSOs often look for ways to build a more mature security operations centre (SOC). However, they may face integration complexities, skill gaps and budget constraints along the way.

In this white paper, we investigate the impact of security maturity on your cyberdefences and how CDW can help organizations improve their security posture with partner solutions from Cisco, Splunk and more.

Security maturity refers to the level of sophistication of an organization’s security processes. We use the SANS Security Maturity Model, which is a framework for assessing and improving an organization's cybersecurity posture, to depict how it correlates to the effectiveness of the SOC. It evaluates the SOC's capabilities across various stages of maturity, focusing on people, processes and technology.

Organizations can use this model to assess their current level of maturity and understand how they can upgrade their SOC for improved security.

The model outlines five stages of security maturity, ranging from minimal capabilities to advanced, optimized operations.

As your organization develops its security processes, the level of proactive threat hunting capabilities continues to rise. This gives you greater visibility into networks and systems, which allows you to respond to threats faster.

However, challenges in maturing your SOC may include making tools and processes work together and automating manual processes. This is where CDW’s security solutions, powered by technology from leading security vendors such as Cisco and Splunk, can help you find the right fit for your SOC without increasing complexity.

Security and network operations are the backbone of the SOC. To evolve these operations, organizations must go through a journey that involves tackling current challenges, defining transformation goals and designing a future SOC state.

This journey would look different for each organization, but it shares the common goal of improving and building upon the current processes. Our security experts can shed light on a systematic SOC transformation roadmap that can help organizations chart the course effectively.

The following challenges depict the difficulties faced by security professionals who operate the daily functioning of an SOC.

1. Alert overload

SOC teams are inundated with thousands of alerts daily, many of which are false positives. This high volume creates fatigue, making it difficult for analysts to focus on genuine threats. Over time, critical alerts may be ignored or missed entirely, increasing the risk of security breaches.

2. Siloed tools

Organizations often deploy multiple security tools that operate independently, creating fragmented data and complicating threat analysis. SOC teams must manually correlate insights from these tools, which is time-consuming and error-prone. This lack of integration hampers real-time threat detection and slows down response times.

3. Resource constraints

SOC operations are often strained by a lack of skilled personnel and limited time to address the growing complexity of threats. Teams may struggle to investigate and remediate incidents promptly, leaving gaps in defences.

4. Inefficient workflows

Manual, repetitive tasks like triaging alerts, gathering data and creating reports, slow down incident response efforts. These inefficiencies reduce productivity and prevent SOC teams from focusing on more pressing priorities.

Once you’ve got an understanding of the areas that need upgrades, your organization can create phased goals for maturing current capabilities and introducing new ones. While each organization would have a unique set of transformation criteria, some common goals may include the following:

• Enhance detection capabilities: Implementing advanced detection tools, including XDR and threat intelligence feeds, to identify more threats in less time.
• Optimize incident response: Streamlining response workflows with automation, such as incident playbooks and integrations with SOAR tools, to reduce response times and human error.
• Automate repetitive tasks: Reduce the burden on analysts by automating detection, triage and remediation processes.
• Adopt a zero-trust model: Move beyond perimeter security to a zero-trust architecture, ensuring that all users and devices are continuously authenticated and verified.

To meet the specific challenges of an organization, security analysts can conduct an IT audit that takes their current and future states into account. CDW’s security services offer a comprehensive assessment for organizations that want to understand the way forward for their SOC.

Whether you’re looking at implementing a mature incident response strategy or improving threat intelligence, CDW security experts closely work with your IT teams to help you upscale your capabilities. The following table shows how the most common SOC challenges can be met, along with the impact for your organization.

Once you’ve understood how to mature your SOC operations, the next phase would be to advance the underlying technology. Our partners at Cisco offer several intuitive security solutions that can strengthen your cyberdefence capabilities alongside Splunk, which now integrates advanced analytics into Cisco’s security fleet.

CDW’s 2024 Canadian Cybersecurity Study found that only one third of surveyed organizations had implemented threat detection capabilities. Cisco XDR can help bridge this gap by unifying threat detection and response across an organization’s infrastructure.

This Cisco solution helps you elevate your threat hunting capabilities by consolidating security data from endpoints, networks, cloud environments and applications into a single pane of glass. IT analysts can not only detect threats before they cause damage, they can also automate the remediation process.

Benefits for your SOC

• Centralized visibility, which reduces security blind spots and improves situational awareness.
• Quicker response times with the help of automatic security metric correlation.
• Automated incident response by implementing security playbooks that can tackle threats based on certain rules and triggers.
• Maps detection and response tactics to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, ensuring alignment with industry best practices.

For enhanced threat detection, CDW experts can help you integrate Cisco XDR with partner solutions from CrowdStrike, Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Entra. We design an integrated security workflow that can pull security metrics from these tools to isolate threats faster and in real time. This intelligence can then be used to take corrective action, such as blocking malware, disabling user devices or delisting IP addresses.

Example scenario: An employee clicks on a phishing email containing ransomware

How Cisco XDR enables the SOC to detect and mitigate this attack:

1. Cisco XDR integrates telemetry from various sources to identify suspicious behaviour such as file encryption and unusual processes kickstarted by the click.
2. Cisco XDR aggregates and correlates threat data from multiple points to build a unified incident view.
3. An automated playbook is triggered to contain the attack. The XDR solution isolates the infected endpoint from the network, blocks further communication and prevents lateral movement.
4. Email security is updated to block similar phishing attempts.

In an era where remote work and hybrid environments are the norm, Cisco Secure Access empowers SOC teams to enforce consistent security policies across a distributed workforce, ensuring that the organization remains protected without compromising usability.

It facilitates access security by ensuring that only authorized users and devices gain access to resources, regardless of their location. Organizations can build their own policies for their hybrid work environment and allow their users to securely access company resources.

Benefits for your SOC

• Aligns with zero-trust principles and allows the implementation of segmented security policies.
• Minimizes the risk of unauthorized access and lateral movement.
• Balances security and productivity in remote and hybrid work environments.

CDW experts offer a granular approach to secure access by combining the power of Cisco and Microsoft solutions. We can help you implement access control runbooks that automate the process of identifying malicious behaviour and respond with predetermined actions.

Example scenario: A high-risk login attempt is detected by Microsoft Defender.

Cisco and Microsoft products work together to contain this threat.

1. Cisco Secure Access assesses the device’s posture and enforces dynamic segmentation.
2. Microsoft Entra applies conditional access policies, requiring multifactor authentication (MFA).
3. Cisco XDR correlates the login attempt with other telemetry (e.g., network anomalies) to assess the threat context.
4. If the risk is confirmed, access is denied and an alert is sent to the SOC.

Splunk SIEM collects and analyzes security event data from across the enterprise to make sure that no stone is left unturned in detecting threats. This allows organizations to stay vigilant for potential cyberattacks and use SOAR capabilities to automatically tackle incoming threats.

SIEM and SOAR capabilities help your organization implement proactive security measures and stay ahead of cyberattackers. Splunk collects security data from a wide range of sources to help SOC teams identify malicious events before they cause harm.

Cisco and Splunk collaboratively improve observability by offering broad and deep insights. The XDR solution leverages security data from Splunk, which helps security teams cover every corner of their IT infrastructure.

This collaboration benefits the SOC with several improved capabilities such as:

• Stronger security at scale: Catch threats proactively and respond to potential threats faster, strengthening your security posture
• Improved network resilience: Intelligent networking helps optimize network performance whenever bottlenecks arise and report threats if unusual activity is discovered
• Deeper observability: Find and isolate threats across on-premises and cloud networks with enhanced observation capabilities from Splunk SIEM
• Automate security with AI: With newer AI capabilities, Cisco and Splunk solutions help decrease the manual burden on your SOC with automated security functions  

When integrated, Splunk can ingest telemetry from Cisco XDR, enabling detailed analysis and correlation with other data sources. This allows SOC teams to gain both high-level visibility and in-depth insights for more informed decision-making.

CDW works as a strategic partner in your security journey to help you combat talent and technology challenges. Whether you’re building a security practice in your organization or have a well-established SOC, our experts will closely guide you on the best way forward.

CDW’s security and network solutions are designed to simplify operations, enhance security postures and reduce response times through a combination of advanced technology, expert services and seamless integration.

CDW’s security offering is built on three core pillars.

CDW’s value-added services

• Training and enablement: CDW provides workshops and training sessions to help IT teams leverage XDR, SIEM and SOAR tools effectively.
• Managed security services: CDW offers 24/7 monitoring, threat hunting and incident response to augment internal capabilities.
• Strategic guidance: CDW’s cybersecurity consultants guide organizations through regulatory compliance and industry best practices.

By simplifying your security operations, CDW empowers organizations to transition from reactive to proactive security management while optimizing costs and freeing up internal resources to focus on strategic initiatives.