Earlier this year, some of the UK’s most prominent companies fell victim to cyberattacks. Marks and Spencer, Co-op Group and Harrods – to name a few – had their IT infrastructure compromised.
A hacking group reportedly known as Scattered Spider used social engineering tactics to impersonate staff within these organisations and their supply chains, gaining unauthorised access to critical IT systems.
These attacks not only risked exposing sensitive customer data but also disrupted business operations, potentially costing millions.
Whilst the full implications of the hacks are still unfolding, it serves as a reminder that regardless of their size or industry, every organisation must prioritise a robust cyber resilience strategy to effectively minimise risks and ensure swift recovery from such threats.
What can be done?
Your employees are a critical first line of defence against cyberattacks. Providing regular training and raising awareness about cyber threats empowers staff to recognise suspicious links and report them promptly – a key step in fostering a strong security culture.
Alongside awareness, encouraging users to create unique, complex passwords and implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) are essential best practices that add critical layers of protection, significantly reducing the risk of breaches across software, accounts, and systems.
While employee vigilance is crucial, it shouldn’t be the sole line of defence as human error is always a possibility. That’s why a Security Operations Centre (SOC) plays a pivotal role, combining skilled personnel, streamlined processes, and advanced technology to deliver real-time threat monitoring and rapid response, ensuring your organisation stays protected around the clock.
Why use a SOC? Well, it plays a key role in protecting sensitive data, maintaining uptime and ensuring business continuity.
Continuous threat monitoring
A SOC provides 24/7 monitoring of networks, systems and endpoints to detect suspicious activity as it happens, before it escalates into a serious breach.
Faster incident response
With dedicated analysts and automated tools, a SOC can rapidly assess, prioritise, and contain threats, reducing the impact on business operations.
Proactive threat hunting
Beyond reactive defence, a SOC proactively searches for hidden threats and vulnerabilities, helping stop attacks before they start.
Centralised visibility
It brings together data from across the organisation – cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments for a unified security view.
Compliance and risk management
A SOC supports regulatory compliance by monitoring adherence to policies, generating reports, and ensuring data security standards are met.
Minimises downtime and financial loss
Early detection and quick response help prevent extended outages, data loss, and costly recovery efforts.
Finding the expertise and resources to adequately deal with cyber threats internally can prove difficult, especially if you have a small team. That’s why to be cyber resilient, many businesses outsource their SOC.
Strengthening cyber resilience with Brightsolid SOC
Here at Brightsolid, we protect businesses across a variety of industries with a combination of our specialist-led SOC service and managed cyber resilience solutions, built on industry-leading security technologies.
Our SOC is built of highly skilled analysts and engineers who act as a first line of defence by monitoring, detecting and responding to threats in real time.
We deploy over 200 custom analytical rules within Microsoft Sentinel to enhance Microsoft Defender’s capabilities to stay ahead of emerging threats.
With our culture of continuous improvement, these rules are regularly refined to ensure our method remain current and effective.
Brightsolid SOC doesn’t stop there. Our team conduct regular threat hunting and use case development to uncover advanced threats that may bypass standard detection rules. To support this, customers receive detailed reporting and analytics during regular service reviews, along with actionable insights to further strength their security posture.
Our multi-layered approach to cyber resilience combines Managed Extended Detection and Response (MXDR), Managed Vulnerability Scanning (MVS) and Immutable Backup. Backed with the expertise of our SOC, this strategy delivers robust resiliency and protection against today’s evolving cyber threats. Let’s dive in and explore how it all works together.
Managed Vulnerability Scanning
Our Managed Vulnerability Scanning service proactively identifies and addresses critical vulnerabilities before attackers do.
It enables organisations gain complete visibility of their entire attack surface and identifies any issues, misconfigurations and weaknesses that are most likely to result in a security breach.
Key features:
Achieve complete visibility of your critical infrastructure
We assess and assign value to your assets and infrastructure, based on their usage, role and importance and undertake vulnerability scanning exercises on your infrastructure. If vulnerabilities are identified, it helps us deliver important insights into business-critical areas that helps to prioritise and remediate the most urgent vulnerabilities.
Detect gaps and identify weaknesses
We scan your infrastructure to identify vulnerabilities derive from asset loss, exposing weaknesses exploited by threat actors. We highlight outdated systems, exploitable web applications and remote access services. Our scans will cover new applications, systems and software to uncover potential vulnerabilities.
Prioritise vulnerabilities for immediate remediation
Vulnerability scanning often surfaces a high volume of vulnerabilities that require remediation. We condense findings into meaningful groups, articulating identified gaps and prioritising remediation efforts based on our initial assessment of your critical infrastructure and processes.
We leverage the Common Vulnerability Scoring System Calculator version 3 (CVSSv3) to provide critical business threat, exploitation and risk context for critical or high-severity vulnerabilities. Partnering with Tenable, we have coverage of over 76,000 vulnerabilities and access to the industry’s most extensive CVE and security configuration support.
Remediate and reduce the risks to your organisation
Gain critical insights through a secure portal, accessing insights around vulnerabilities that have been identified. Within the portal, access comprehensive custom reports and dashboards on identified and remediated risks and vulnerabilities to help plan remediation efforts and to provide insight on common trends, targeted vulnerabilities and industry-specific risks.
Managed Extended Detection and Response
With 24/7 threat monitoring and rapid incident response, our MXDR service minimises the risk of attacks on your organisation and stops threats in their tracks.
Key features:
Brightsolid’s Security Operations Centre
This is the front line. Our team of expert analysts who are dedicated to identifying, analysing and mitigating potential threats 24x7x365. They are responsible for determining the nature of any threat and its impact on your organisation.
A Microsoft security platform
You want the best in the business to look after your important assets.
We use Microsoft Defender to provide real-time, on-the-ground protection for individual assets, delivering immediate threat prevention and response. Meanwhile, Microsoft Sentinel aggregates logs and threat intelligence from Defender and a range of other sources. It applies AI-driven automation and advanced analytics to enhance detection, streamline incident response, and support SOC analysts with proactive threat hunting and deep investigations.
This delivers data and insights from cloud, on-premises assets, users, devices, applications and platforms that can generate and send logs. The SOC analysts can then evaluate the data to detect any malicious activities.
Faster threat response time
MXDRs Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) means that if there are ever times when there are a lot of potential incidents, it acts as a first responder. It can quickly isolate assets, so threats can be tackled at speed.
Reliable, reassuring incident response
We have a range of Incident Response activities that offer triage, analysis and guidance on dealing with urgent or complex cyber security threats. Cyber security experts can offer support with live incident response activities and post-incident forensics, so incidents are handled immediately and effectively.
Immutable Backup
Partnering with Druva, a leader in cloud data protection, Brightsolid delivers Backup as a Service (BaaS) through immutable, ransomware resilient backups. By design, these write-once, read-many (WORM) backups are protected from alteration or deletion during a set retention period and stored using air-gapped, AES-256 encrypted storage within Brightsolid’s secure UK data centres.
In the event of a cyber attack or data breach, immutable backups provide a trusted last line of defence, isolated from the production environments and inaccessible to attackers, ensuring backups remain clean, verifiable, and ready to restore. This allows organisations to recover quickly without risking data compromise or paying ransoms.
Our BaaS includes automated backup scheduling, regular integrity checks, and centralised data protection and management of hybrid workloads, all monitored by our SOC team. Built with compliance in mind, it supports robust audit trails and retention policies aligned with industry regulations.
By combining immutability with rapid recovery, our BaaS enables a resilient, responsive backup strategy that is a critical pillar for cyber resilience and business continuity.
In today’s threat landscape, a SOC is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity. With cyberattacks growing in sophistication and frequency, businesses need a centralised, proactive defence hub that can detect, respond to, and mitigate threats in real time.
A well-structured managed SOC not only strengthens an organisations IT security but also ensures compliance, protects brand reputation, and supports business continuity. Investing in a managed SOC isn’t just about technology; it’s about building resilience for the future.
Interested in improving your cyber resilience? Get in touch
If you’re interested in exploring how our cyber resilience solution could enhance your IT security, you can book a call with a member of our team here.
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