SecOps vs SOC: What's the Difference and What Should You Build?

SecOps vs SOC

SecOps prevents security gaps before deployment, while SOC catches threats that slip through. The distinction between SecOps and SOC is clearer in terms of timing and application. SecOps operates during planned changes. For example, SecOps ensures proper authentication, secrets management, and network segmentation from the start when your development team deploys a new microservices architecture.

Meanwhile, SOC operates continuously. When an attacker exploits a zero-day vulnerability, your SOC detects suspicious behavior, investigates correlated events, and contains the threat by isolating affected systems.

Both are necessary because no preventative approach catches everything, and no detective approach should operate without a preventive one to minimise the attack surface.

What Is SecOps?

Security Operations (SecOps) is a collaborative approach that integrates the cybersecurity and IT operations teams to monitor, detect, investigate, and respond to cyber threats. Instead of reacting to security events after deployment, SecOps embeds security checks into daily operations and development workflows for shared responsibility.

Benefits of SecOps

The primary benefit of SecOps is that it integrates your security and SecOps teams. This integration delivers several operational improvements:

• Faster threat detection: Gain visibility across endpoints, networks, identities, and cloud environments and reveal cross-domain cyberattacks that fragmented teams would miss.

• Streamlined incident response: Allow security and operations personnel to contain threats rapidly when incidents occur via defined escalation paths and shared communication channels.

• Improved signal-to-noise ratio: Filter out false positives with correlation and enrichment capabilities while handling routine triage and containment for known threat patterns via security automation. Analysts focus on genuine risks instead of investigating redundant or false alerts.

• Reduced attack surface: Eliminate exploitable vulnerabilities before attackers find them. SecOps achieves this through continuous external asset discovery and risk-based prioritization.

Limitations of SecOps

Structural challenges for SecOps emerge when data security solutions remains isolated from development workflows:

• Reactive nature: SecOps addresses security incidents only after they appear in production environments. This means that it may miss opportunities to eliminate vulnerabilities during design and build phases when remediation is simpler and cheaper.

• Development gap: When security functions independently from engineering teams, code-level flaws and configuration errors reach production undetected.

• Integration complexity: Organizations accumulate security tools that don’t interoperate cleanly. Analysts have to move between separate dashboards to manually piece together attack narratives, while maintaining brittle custom integrations that require constant upkeep as vendors release updates.

What Is SOC?

A Security Operations Center (SOC) is a centralized entity that houses dedicated security teams who monitor, detect, analyze, and respond to cybersecurity incidents in real time. SOC teams operate 24/7/365, with analysts working in tiers.

For example, Level 1 analysts perform initial alert triage, Level 2 analysts investigate suspicious activity, and Level 3 analysts handle complex incidents requiring deep technical expertise.

Benefits of SOC

SOC operations deliver ongoing security capabilities through continuous monitoring and specialized analyst expertise.

• 24/7 threat detection: Continuous monitoring catches attacks during nights, weekends, and holidays, when adversaries often strike, reducing the window during which attackers can operate undetected.

• Regulatory compliance: SOC operations create the audit trails and incident documentation required by regulations, demonstrating active threat monitoring and appropriate response procedures.

• Dedicated expertise: Building security knowledge in a dedicated team addresses the cybersecurity skills gap more effectively than requiring every IT infrastructure team to develop deep security capabilities.

Limitations of SOC

SOC operations face challenges that impact effectiveness and require security strategy solutions.

• Staffing difficulties: The global shortage of cybersecurity workers reached 4.76 million in 2024. This represents persistent hiring challenges. Moreover, 70% of junior analysts leave within three years, creating constant training burdens.

• High investment costs: Building in-house SOCs requires substantial resources for tools, platforms, analysts, and management, making costs prohibitive for smaller organizations without SOC-as-a-Service alternatives.

• Alert fatigue: SOC analysts face an average of 11,000 daily alerts, with only 19% requiring investigation, forcing cybersecurity professionals to spend excessive time on false positives rather than genuine security threats.

Learn more about establishing an effective SOC in our blog, Setting Up a Security Operations Center (SOC): What You Should Know.

SecOps vs SOC: Key Differences

Decide when to leverage the SecOps strategy versus the SOC, depending on your organizational needs. They differ across these operational dimensions:

Integrating SecOps into the SOC

SecOps and SOC must function as complementary parts of a unified security program, rather than separate initiatives competing for resources. Here’s how you can seamlessly integrate SecOps into SOC:

1. Shared goals and handoff points

SecOps and SOC share the objective to reduce risk without disrupting operations. Clearly defined handoff points prevent security gaps during this integration process:

• When does a SecOps-identified vulnerability become a SOC monitoring concern?

• When does a SOC-detected attack pattern inform SecOps hardening activities?

A Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, or Informed (RACI) matrix helps map ownership from detection through remediation.

You can utilize a shared severity model that considers both vulnerability risk and threat intelligence. Then, set Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that span the full lifecycle: SOC owns detection and response windows, while SecOps owns remediation timelines. Continue refining these handoffs over time with monthly incident reviews.

2. Collaboration and communication

Weekly case reviews bring together SecOps, SOC, IT, and risk management to build a shared context. A single case management system keeps everyone aligned, enabling SOC analysts to view SecOps deployment notes in real time.

Tagging incidents with playbook IDs keeps response fast, while decision logs explain the rationale behind actions, such as why an IP wasn’t blocked, or why a patch was delayed. This shared visibility reduces friction and speeds up resolution.

3. Roles by maturity

The integration of SecOps and SOC depends heavily on your organization’s security maturity, which evolves through five levels that require different proactive approaches.

Level 1 to 2: Foundational integration

At early maturity, integration should be light, practical, and focused on preventing incidents that could cause the ball to drop. Basic integration means establishing simple communication channels through which SecOps and security personnel meet regularly to discuss infrastructure changes and visible threats.

Documentation can be basic, such as a shared wiki or document repository for important security information. Focus on high-confidence detections that reliably indicate real threats rather than overwhelming limited personnel with alerts.

IT teams should also consider establishing an incident response retainer to ensure they have vetted external expertise ready to engage immediately in the event of a serious incident.

Level 3 to 4: Operational integration

Organizations at moderate maturity typically have established business operations, either in-house or outsourced. SOC consulting services become valuable for conducting gap assessments: where are your blind spots, what threats are you not detecting, and how effective are your current playbooks?

Threat intelligence integration becomes a shared decision input. SOCs can use a Threat Intelligence platform to enrich detections and investigations, while SecOps relies on the same intelligence to drive vulnerability management.

When threat intelligence shows active exploitation of a specific vulnerability class, SecOps should move those issues to the front of the queue, even if they do not rank highest by CVSS alone.

Detection engineering emerges as a distinct discipline. Rather than relying solely on vendor-provided detection rules, organizations develop custom detections tailored to their environment, requiring input from both SecOps and SOC analysts.

Level 5: Continuous validation

Mature organizations move beyond reactive improvement to continuous validation. Purple teaming exercises, where offensive security experts simulate attacks while defenders attempt detection, validate whether your integrated SecOps and SOC capabilities actually work against realistic threats. These exercises should involve both teams:

• Vulnerability assessments identify exploitable weaknesses in your infrastructure

• Penetration testing simulates real-world attacks to test defenses

• Purple teaming brings SecOps and SOC together to validate the organization’s security posture.

SecOps confirms whether security controls actually prevent or detect attacks, while SOC validates whether monitoring and response procedures contain threats within acceptable timeframes.

4. Automation

Automation reduces manual toil and accelerates response through three key mechanisms:

• Auto-enrichment adds context to alerts automatically (e.g., pulling asset information, user identity security data, and threat intelligence) so analysts don’t spend time gathering basic facts.

• One-click containment actions for common scenarios enable immediate responses to routine threats.

• Scheduled hygiene security tasks maintain detection quality without manual intervention by disabling noisy detection rules, removing stale insider threat intelligence indicators, and updating asset inventories.

5. Continuous improvement

Lessons learned from incidents drive improvements to security practices. After SOC responds to an incident, teams should analyze root causes: Could SecOps have prevented this through different configuration standards, architecture decisions, or deployment practices?

Conversely, when SecOps identifies systemic security weaknesses during architecture reviews or deployment retrospectives, they should engage the SOC to determine whether these weaknesses represent active attack vectors. SOC’s real-world threat data helps effective SecOps prioritize which theoretical vulnerabilities to address first.

Metrics should tell a coherent story across both security professionals. If SOC’s MTTD is improving but incidents are increasing, SecOps needs to address preventative controls. If SecOps reduces vulnerabilities but SOC’s alert volume doesn’t decrease, perhaps the detection rules need tuning.

Common Pitfalls and Fixes

Organizations frequently encounter three critical challenges when integrating SecOps and SOC operations.

1. Tool sprawl

Security teams accumulate SecOps tools organically over time, resulting in dozens of security products that fail to integrate well and create sensitive data silos.

How to fix: Consolidate tools by use case. Map your security capabilities, identify which tools you actually use versus which have been abandoned, and retire duplicates. Favor platforms over point solutions to reduce integration complexity.

The Art of SOC, Group-IB’s ultimate guide to building intelligence-driven information security operations, outlines how capabilities such as threat intelligence, threat hunting, and attack surface security management work together within a battle-tested SOC framework.

2. Vanity metrics

Many organizations track metrics that look impressive but don’t indicate actual security measures. Counting alerts processed, tickets closed, or security vulnerabilities scanned creates the appearance of productivity without demonstrating risk reduction.

How to fix: Replace volume metrics with outcome-focused measurements. Track time-to-detect, time-to-contain, and rule change lead time. These metrics directly correlate with reducing the impact of breaches.

3. One-off exercises

Organizations conduct annual penetration tests or tabletop exercises, check the compliance box, then forget about continuous improvement.

How to fix: Implement purple teaming and continuous validation services that provide ongoing assessment rather than discovering gaps once per year.

Build Intelligence-Driven Security orchestration with Group-IB

Group-IB Unified Risk Platform connects core capabilities needed for intelligence-driven security operations, such as Threat Intelligence, Managed XDR, Attack Surface Management, and Digital Risk Protection, together with takedown and incident response expertise.

This ecosystem helps security teams align on a shared adversary-centric view of risk, identify which assets are exposed externally, and focus monitoring and hardening on what attackers are most likely to target.

Managed XDR delivers real-time detection and response across endpoints, networks, and cloud environments with analyst oversight and pre-defined playbooks for fast containment. It centralizes and correlates telemetry, reduces alert noise, and gives SOC teams the context they need to triage, investigate, and stop incidents more consistently.

Strengthening security operations is easier with a partner that covers the full lifecycle. Talk to our experts about how Group-IB’s security operations services, frameworks, and consulting can be tailored to your cyber defense team.