So earlier this year, again in my past life as an analyst, I spoke to a bunch of users, vendors and experts hoping to get some best practices about creating a Security Operations Center (SOC). For Forrester customers, I published my findings here.
To be honest, I originally came at this piece of research as a way to define what the place of a SIEM product in a SOC, so I diligently asked everyone I interviewed what technologies they thought were central to a security operations function. The answers I got were pretty unexpected, and normally started with the phrase "Technology? Oh that's an afterthought."
When we think of a SOC, we often have this picture of a big room, full of people in rows staring at a big screen up front, with monitors in front of them...





