Training, Retaining & Upskilling SOC Teams

SOC (Security Operations Centre) professionals are at the core of your organisation’s security team, with a responsibility to monitor, prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to cyber threats around the clock.

With the cyber security threat landscape rapidly evolving and attacks becoming more sophisticated, there is never a better reason to invest in the upskilling and development of your SOC team. Upskilling your security team should form a pillar of your security plan, and is key to future-proofing your cyber security operations team.

Keep reading to discover how to continuously upskill your SOC team, the benefits of doing so,  and how Security Operations & Monitoring and ongoing TryHackMe training can strengthen your SOC team.

Knowledge of the Latest Threats

New vulnerabilities surface every day. To ensure SOC teams are up to speed and prepared in all scenarios, it’s crucial to keep your team aware of recent threats with hands-on cyber security training, arming them with the knowledge needed to mitigate negative implications of emerging and evolving tactics.

Giving the confidence to deal with all types of threats will allow security teams to better interpret analytics, giving them greater visibility to threats and the early warning signs to look out for. This also includes maintaining and updating existing systems, reviewing all network activities, and patching vulnerabilities, alongside other core SOC team responsibilities.

Outdated security operations training loses relevancy quickly - as tools, tactics, and threats change consistently in our industry. It’s all too common for SOC teams to be given training that has been developed and marginally adapted (if at all,) years ago. Your team should be up to date with all the latest security developments to be as prepared as possible.

Proactive Defence

Attackers work hard to avoid detection, which is why SOC Analysts proactively search for and investigate evidence of anomalies that may indicate an attack.

SOC teams must possess an in-depth knowledge of threat intelligence, incident response, digital forensics, vulnerability management, and endpoint analysis. If you're not upskilling your SOC team, the skill gaps will only widen.

SOC Analysts deal with a growing number of alerts on a day-to-day basis. While common causes often include phishing attacks, social engineering attempts, stolen passwords, and other forms of human error, training professionals outside of the SOC team is equally as important. Adopting cyber security training for non-technical teams can aid in building a cyber-savvy team capable of helping to prevent breaches.

Quick Response Times

With the rise of complex attacks, SOC teams must respond quickly with accuracy. This is where the 1/10/60 challenge comes in, whereby analysts have an average of one minute to detect an attack, 10 minutes to understand it and 60 minutes to contain it.

Threat hunting and intelligence monitoring are vital in detecting and preventing the early stages of an attack, and a key understanding of these tools will help to improve the average response time to threats.

Employee Retention

A challenge faced by many SOC teams around the globe is the lack of automation and ongoing training and development, resulting in the difficulty of retaining talent - contributing towards the cyber skills shortage.

SOC analysts are the first line of defence. Therefore, investing time, resources and ongoing training will allow your security operations team to further their education, putting them in a more advanced position to monitor and analyse the organisation’s security posture.

With talented cyber security individuals in short supply, training, upskilling and investing in your SOC team members is pivotal.

TryHackMe for SOC Teams

TryHackMe consists of over 560 real-world training labs to teach these topics in-action, arming your team with the knowledge needed for defensive security operations.

Our training pathways explore high-level offensive and defensive security content, allowing security teams to stay on top of new threats and advances in the industry, and are perfect for SOC teams alongside the entirety of your team to build foundations for a cyber culture.