Discussion post

Due Day 3

Looking at the different layers of network infrastructure provides many opportunities to recognize vulnerabilities, select and deploy countermeasures, and monitor ongoing operations. A businesss network operations center (NOC) and security operations center (SOC) work collaboratively to effectively manage and protect a businesss information and infrastructure.

 

Respond to the following in a minimum of 175 words:

Discuss some of the different tools, technologies, and/or processes that NOC and SOC teams can use to safeguard an organizations assets and the different roles of each team. Would you rather be part of a SOC or NOC team, and why?

 

Due Day 7

Post 2 replies to classmates or your faculty member. Be constructive and professional.

Reply 1 Quincy Troutman: There are many different tools, technologies, and/or processes that network operation centers and security operation centers use to safeguard company assets. Network operation centers would need a way to track data packets while being able to view the whole network. NOCs will have to spot outages and attacks quickly and come up with a way to fix them in a timely manner or report them to another center. Security operation centers need the same system to view the network, but also needs to be able to run security test, scans, etc. SOCs need to be able to spot threats, stop threats, and analyze what caused the threat. Also, SOCs need to mitigate future threats. Which would I rather be a part of? Well, I would have to pick the SOC team. They are usually an elite crew and being able to be a part of a well-oiled machine would be really cool. I would like to try both since I think I would enjoy both teams.

Reply 2 Robert Smith:

Hello class,

Although the NOC and SOC have very different roles there is some overlap in their tools and their responsibilities. First I will describe the NOC and then the SOC.

NOC responsibilities:

Data backup

network monitoring and availability

downtime alert management and service restoration and remediation

reporting including trent analisis

24/7 network, software and hardware monitoring

SOC responsibilities:

24/7 network vulnerability monitoring

security policies

comprehensive investigations and remediation

security log reviews

threat detection and mitigation

As you can see from the above list both teams would use network logging tools to monitor the network and firewall. However, the would be looking for different things in the logs. For example NOC would be looking at availability and load on the firewall while the SOC would be looking for possible attacks and DDos attacks. The NOC may be alerted to increased traffic and ask the SOC to investigate, or the SOC could notice an attack and notify the SOC why there is increased load.

Other tools that both would/could use are network monitoring, network mapping, policy documentation, notification, and authentication I am sure that I am missing some.

As for me I believe that I would rather be part of the SOC. I like the challenge of finding and solving the problem if there is an issue. Looking for new issues and new ways to prevent them. The NOC in my opinion is insuring the network in the same and runs the same always. I feel more challenges and I like to solve challenges.