With businesses evolving rapidly and leveraging new tools to enhance their operations and processes, the attack surface area has seemingly tripled overnight for many organizations. Depending on their resources, many smaller businesses may opt for the help of a trusted security advisor to oversee the prevention, detection and response of cyber incidents, but those with a lower cyber risk tolerance may also need an on-site security operations center (SOC).

Comprised of experienced cybersecurity analysts and trained engineers, these SOCs serve as the centralized command centers that collect and monitor data as it moves across various platforms and endpoints. But if you’re an up-and-coming security leader, when is it time to begin building out your own SOC and what steps should you take to reach an ideal operational state within the security organization?

That depends on the complexity of your business, says Kory Daniels, global managing partner of intelligence security operations (iSecOps) at Trustwave.

“[The ideal SOC] should not only be adaptive to the threat landscape, but it should be adaptive to the business's internal innovation,” Daniels says.

Many organizations make the mistake of purchasing security technology without accounting for the skilled people and processes needed to effectively operate those tools. 

For many, the return on investment is slow to realize for an in-house operation, and they might have been better leveraging a partner in a hybrid model to mature their iSecOps.

In the full video interview below, Daniels highlights the major thoughts and considerations security leaders should keep top of mind when it’s time to build out an elite security operations center.

To learn more about how Trustwave can help you build out a security operations center, or provide you with the same expertise and benefits of having one, read more about our offerings here.

Marcos Colón is the content marketing manager at Trustwave and a former IT security reporter and editor.