Security Operations Center ( SOC ) Analyst

Investigating Potential Incidents: SOC teams receive a large number of alerts, but not all alerts point to real attacks. SOC analysts are responsible for digging into a potential incident to determine if it is a real attack or a false positive.
Triaging and Prioritizing Detected Incidents: Not all security incidents are created equal, and an organization has limited incident response resources. Once an incident has been identified, it needs to be triaged and prioritized to optimize resource utilization and minimize enterprise risk.
Coordinating an Incident Response: Responding to an incident requires engagement with multiple stakeholders and the use of a variety of different tools. SOC analysts must orchestrate this process to ensure that oversights do not result in a delayed or incomplete remediation.
However, the role of the SOC is not limited to incident response.

Other SOC roles and responsibilities include:
Maintaining Relevance: The cyber threat landscape is constantly evolving, and SOC teams need to be able to manage the latest threats to the organization. This includes keeping up with new and trending attacks and ensuring that security systems have an updated set of rules to help detect such attacks.
Patching Vulnerable Systems: Exploitation of vulnerabilities is a common attack vector for cybercriminals. SOC teams are responsible for identifying, applying, and testing patches for vulnerable enterprise systems and software.
Infrastructure Management: As the cyber threat landscape changes and the enterprise network evolves, new security solutions are required. SOC teams are responsible for identifying, deploying, configuring, and managing their security infrastructure.
Addressing Support Tickets: Many SOC teams are part of the IT department. This means that SOC analysts may be called upon to address support tickets from an organizations employees.
Reporting to Management: Security is part of the business, and SOC teams need to report to management like any other department. This requires the ability to effectively communicate security costs and return on investment to a business audience.