SOC Operations

Every security control an organization buys is, in the end, an instrument that has to be played. SOC Operations: Running an Effective Security Operations Center is the practitioner's guide to playing it well.

This book walks aspiring and current SOC analysts, team leads, and managers through the twelve areas that determine whether a SOC actually reduces risk: mission and operating models, roles and tiers, the SIEM/XDR/SOAR technology stack, log onboarding, alert triage, detection engineering, tuning, automation, shift operations, metrics, working with adjacent teams, and building and maturing the function over time.

This isn't a theory book. Every chapter pairs concepts with artifacts you can use immediately: Sigma and KQL detection examples you can adapt to your own environment, a full triage checklist, a shift handoff template, an escalation matrix, a metrics dashboard description, and a complete worked phishing incident traced from ingestion to closure.

Three principles run through the book: process precedes technology, detection is a software engineering discipline, and automation is a force multiplier, not a substitute for analysts. Whether you're triaging your first alert or building a SOC roadmap for the year ahead, this book gives you the patterns that work.