NOC Vs SOC - What's The Difference? - Check Point Software

The Main Differences Between the NOC and the SOC

While the NOC and the SOC are two teams within an organization with very similar roles, some significant differences exist between them, including the following.

1. Objectives

At a high level, the NOC and the SOC have the same primary objective: to ensure that the corporate network is able to meet the needs of the business. However, the details of these objectives differ between the two.

A NOC’s focus is on ensuring that the network is capable of meeting SLAs during normal operations and addressing natural disruptions, such as service outages, natural disasters, etc. The SOC, on the other hand, works to protect the network and business operations against interference by cyber threat actors.

2. Adversaries

The NOC and the SOC are both working to protect the corporate network against disruption. However, they are fighting against different adversaries.

The NOC is primarily focused on preventing network interference by natural or not human-driven events. This includes power outages, Internet outages, natural disasters, etc. SOC analysts, on the other hand, protect against human-driven disruptions. Their role is to identify, triage, and respond to cyberattacks that can disrupt operations or otherwise cause harm to the business.

3. Required Skills

NOC and SOC analysts require many of the same skills. In both cases, they need to be able to monitor the operation of the network and identify and address issues that are causing network performance degradation or outages. However, NOC and SOC analysts apply their skills differently and have different areas of focus.

A NOC analyst will use their network monitoring skills primarily to diagnose and correct “natural” issues within their infrastructure. Additionally, NOC analysts’ skillsets will also focus more on optimizing network infrastructure and endpoints than their SOC counterparts.

SOC analysts, on the other hand, are tasked with protecting the organization against human actors and human-driven threats. This requires the ability to understand how a cyber attack chain works and to remediate infections that are intentionally designed by a human being to be malicious and to evade detection. Instead of network and endpoint optimization, SOC analysts’ skillsets will be tuned more to hardening and ensuring the resiliency and security of corporate IT assets.