A Step-by-Step Guide to Maturing Your SOC

A mature SOC ensures better defensive capabilities, improved operational efficiency, and stronger alignment with business objectives.

In this guide, brought to you by TryHackMe, we’ll take you through the key steps to maturing your SOC. And with the release of our brand-new SOC Simulator, we’ve made it easier than ever to train your team and test your capabilities. Let’s dive in!

Step 1: Define Your SOC’s Mission and Scope

First and foremost, you need to set clear objectives for your SOC and understand the current set of activities occurring in the SOC. Ask yourself:

What are the key objectives of your SOC? Most SOC teams perform key roles including detection and response, attack surface exposure and management and threat detection
What are your technical capabilities under each of these areas
How do you staff and operate your SOC: Is the SOC centralised, distributed, or virtual?

Having a clear mission and scope ensures your resources are aligned with your organisational priorities. Use this as a foundation to benchmark your maturity.

Step 2: Assess Your Current Maturity Level

Conduct a thorough SOC maturity assessment of your SOC’s current capabilities under each of the 4 objectives mentioned above. This includes evaluating:

Technology: Are your tools adequate for the threats you face? Consider evaluating your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems, Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), and threat intelligence platforms. This evaluation will provide comprehensive visibility, integrate effectively with one another, and offer the advanced detection and response capabilities needed to address current and emerging threats. This broad assessment will reveal gaps in your technology stack and guide you in making targeted improvements that improve your overall security maturity.
Processes: Does your organisation have well-documented, regularly reviewed workflows for detection, triage, and incident response? Ensure these processes clearly define roles, responsibilities, and escalation paths, integrate with your broader risk management framework, and align with recognised industry best practices.
People: Do your security personnel have the necessary skills, training, and authority to respond effectively to both current and emerging threats? Ensuring they do involves regular professional development, clear role definitions, and the right tools and processes to enable swift and decisive action.

As part of this SOC maturity assessment, you should also conduct a gap analysis. Based on your objectives and aspirational state, where are you right now, and what are you missing in terms of people, processes, and technology that will help you achieve your aspirational state?

The TryHackMe SOC Simulator can be a game-changer here, providing realistic, hands-on scenarios to evaluate your team’s readiness and pinpoint skill gaps that may need some attention.

Step 3: Develop and Improve Standardised Processes

A mature SOC operates like a well-oiled machine. To achieve this, you need standardised, repeatable processes, such as:

Runbooks and Playbooks:

Ensure you have documented step-by-step actions for common threats like phishing, ransomware, or DDoS attacks
These should be regularly updated and reviewed to keep up with the latest threat and reflect lessons learned from previous incidents
These should also be easily accessible and follow consistent formats so they are easy to use

Incident Response Plans:

Your incident response plan should be thorough and talk through what to do in the event of a broad range of scenarios
There should be clear information on the roles and responsibilities of each individual involved in the incident
This plan should be regularly reviewed and tested to ensure that they can be well executed in the time of an incident

Metrics and KPIs:

Track and define metrics like Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) to measure efficiency.
These metrics should be regularly reviewed and used to drive improvements across the wider team

We also advise regularly testing and refining these processes using simulated attack scenarios in TryHackMe’s SOC Simulator, which provides extensive performance metrics like Mean Time to Respond (MTTR), alert investigation accuracy, and false positive rates.

Step 4: Invest in Training and Development

Your SOC is only as strong as your people! Cyber threats evolve constantly, so continuous hands-on SOC training and simulations are crucial in developing practical skills for incident response in cyber security. Below, we recommend some fantastic resources to help your team stay agile and proactive in defending against evolving threats:

SOC Level 1 training

The SOC Level 1 learning path focuses on foundational skills, including log analysis, network traffic investigation, and basic incident response. This SOC analyst training is also perfect for junior analysts or teams just starting their SOC journey.

SOC Level 2 training

The SOC Level 2 learning path, on the other hand, dives deeper into advanced topics like threat hunting, malware analysis, and proactive defence strategies, ensuring mid-level analysts can take their skills to the next level.

Recent threats training

Next up, recent threats! Our Recent Threats module is a valuable resource for SOC teams to enhance their threat intelligence, incident response capabilities, and overall operational efficiency. This module covers the latest industry threats, allowing your team to gain hands-on experience identifying, exploiting, and mitigating critical vulnerabilities.

SOC Simulator

TryHackMe’s SOC Simulator is crucial for SOC development and keeping your team sharp and responsive! It replicates a live SOC environment with dynamic alert queues and AI-driven feedback to improve performance. The Simulator prepares analysts to make fast, accurate decisions during high-pressure incidents.

We’ll cover this more in step 10, or you can explore it now by clicking the button below!

Step 5: Leverage Threat Intelligence

A mature SOC doesn’t just react to threats - it proactively hunts them. Threat intelligence helps you:

Understand Adversaries: Gain insights into attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) through threat intelligence feeds, enabling your SOC to anticipate and counter specific threats more effectively.
Prioritise Alerts: Use threat intelligence to assign risk levels to alerts, ensuring your team focuses on the most pressing and potentially damaging threats.
Enhance Detection Rules: Leverage intelligence to fine-tune your SIEM and intrusion detection systems (IDS), reducing false positives and increasing detection accuracy.
Strengthen Incident Response: Use real-time intelligence during active incidents to guide containment and eradication strategies, such as identifying associated indicators of compromise (IOCs).
Collaborate Across Industries: Share intelligence with peers and industry groups to build a collective defence against common adversaries, especially for sector-specific threats.

To make the most of threat intelligence, ensure your team has the skills to analyse and operationalise the data effectively. With our Cyber Threat Intelligence module, your team will explore threat intelligence concepts, including their lifecycle, various frameworks used, and a few open-source tools used to analyse malicious activities.

Step 6: Automate, Where Possible

Manual processes can slow down your SOC and lead to missed threats, whereas SOC automation can improve efficiency, accuracy, and speed by streamlining processes and workflows.

When asked what tools would have the most impact on reducing their security team’s stress levels, 83% of SOC leaders said tools that use AI to automate security activity, according to SenseOn.

Key areas to automate include:

Alert Triage: Use machine learning to filter out false positives.
Incident Response: Automate tasks like isolating compromised endpoints or blocking malicious IPs.
Threat Hunting: Leverage scripts and tools to scan for indicators of compromise (IOCs).

Step 7: Continuously Test and Improve

Maturing your SOC is an ongoing process! Continuous improvement involves regularly evaluating incident response processes, testing detection capabilities, and conducting exercises like tabletop simulations and red team/blue team drills.

It also requires ongoing training to keep analysts skilled in the latest tools and techniques. Leveraging metrics such as mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) can help identify areas for optimisation. Additionally, fostering a culture of collaboration, knowledge sharing, and feedback ensures your SOC team remains adaptable, resilient, and prepared for emerging threats.

Some of our top tips for testing SOC capabilities include:

Red Team/Blue Team Exercises: Simulate real-world attacks to test your defences
Tabletop Exercises: Walk through your incident response plan with key stakeholders
SOC Simulator: With TryHackMe’s SOC Simulator, you can practice against a wide range of simulated threats and scenarios to build resilience.

Step 8: Benchmark Against Frameworks

Benchmarking against frameworks is crucial! Frameworks like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), MITRE ATT&CK, and ISO 27001 provide standardised guidelines and best practices for managing cyber security risks. For example:

MITRE ATT&CK: Use this framework to map your detection and response capabilities against known attack techniques.
NIST Cybersecurity Framework: Align your SOC practices with NIST’s core functions: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover.
ISO/IEC 27001: Implement security controls and processes to meet this internationally recognised standard.

To go into more detail, here are the benefits of benchmarking against these frameworks:

Assess Maturity: Determine the current state of your SOC's capabilities and identify areas for improvement.
Enhance Threat Detection: Use frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to map detection and response capabilities to specific attack techniques and tactics.
Ensure Compliance: Align with regulatory and legal requirements, reducing risks associated with audits or breaches.
Improve Processes: Implement structured workflows and best practices to streamline incident response and threat hunting.
Measure Progress: Track improvements over time by regularly benchmarking against framework standards.

Using these frameworks ensures your SOC operations align with industry standards, helping identify gaps, improve processes, and enhance overall security posture!

Step 9: Foster Collaboration

Collaboration is vital to the success of Security Operations Center (SOC) teams, as effective cyber security requires seamless coordination among team members, departments, and even external entities.

SOC teams often face complex, fast-moving threats that require diverse expertise, including threat intelligence, incident response, and vulnerability management. When team members work collaboratively, they can share insights, pool skills, and act decisively to identify and mitigate risks more effectively than they could in isolation.

In high-pressure situations like SOC incident response, a collaborative culture strengthens trust and coordination, allowing the SOC team to respond quickly and efficiently with confidence and unity.

Step 10: Leverage the TryHackMe SOC Simulator

Introducing the SOC Simulator — designed to replicate a live SOC environment with dynamic alert queues and AI-driven feedback to improve performance.

SOC Simulator is a state-of-the-art training experience that places analysts in scenarios with real tools to hone their skills. This allows your team to enhance their capabilities, gaining the expertise and confidence to safeguard your organisation! The SOC Simulator is more than just a training tool – it’s a strategic investment to strengthen your security posture and empower your team to confidently tackle today’s complex threats. Here’s a breakdown of the core benefits:

Master triage and analysis skills

Analysts will triage live alerts in a real SOC environment, sort true and false positives, and gain critical investigative experience.

Accelerate onboarding

Minimise shadowing periods and fast-track skill acquisition.

Improve team communication

Leverage AI-driven case report evaluations to refine communication skills.

Improve SOC performance

Track improvements in Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) and false positive rates to drive efficiency.

Don’t just react to threats - stay ahead of them!

By following these steps and leveraging tools like the TryHackMe SOC Simulator, you can build a SOC that is resilient, efficient, and ready to tackle the most advanced threats.

Did you know? Hundreds of businesses use TryHackMe to empower their employees across the globe. The nature of browser-based, bite-sized, guided training means employees can adapt their own training plans to their company goals and job responsibilities. For a free demo of how our SOC Simulator and blue team training can help your team, click the button below!