A Security Operation Center (SOC) is a centralized function within an organization employing people, processes, and technology to continuously monitor and improve an organization’s security posture while preventing, detecting, analyzing, and responding to cybersecurity incidents in real time.

A SOC acts like the hub or central command post, taking in telemetry from across an organization’s IT infrastructure, including its networks, devices, appliances, and information stores, wherever those assets reside. The proliferation of advanced threats places a premium on collecting context from diverse sources. Essentially, the SOC is the correlation point for every event logged within the organization that is being monitored. For each of these events, the SOC must decide how they will be managed and acted upon.

In a very real sense, a SOC is a group of Security engineers that monitors your systems, 24/7,  to detect breaches and vulnerabilities. These engineers are alerted whenever an anomaly occurs on your systems and begins immediately to remedy the situation before you even know it occurs.