Jun 20, 2021
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Building a SOC That Works: SIEM, SOAR & EDR for Real-Time Detection
Most BFSI organizations we talk to already have a SIEM. Many have endpoint protection. A few even bought a SOAR license last year. But when we ask "when was the last time your SOC stopped a real attack in real time?", the room goes quiet.
Because only tools don't make a resilient SOC. Integration does! And integration is where most teams struggle.
SCS Tech India believes in building SOCs for banks, insurers, and financial firms to know one thing: SIEM + SOAR + EDR only works when they stop acting like three different products and start acting like one team.
Let us have a look at how we make that happen without the marketing fluff.
What is SIEM? Why is it an Important Part of Security Systems?
Your SIEM is drowning. A typical mid-sized bank sends millions of logs per day. Core banking, ATM switches, internet banking portals, employee laptops, cloud workloads, etc., are part of everyday activity. The SIEM happily ingests everything. Then it starts firing alerts. Hundreds of them, and most are false positives.
One of the companies had seven security analysts spending 70% of their time just triaging alerts. Not investigating. Not responding. Just figuring out which alert might be real.
That's not security. That's noise management.
A resilient SOC doesn't mean a louder SIEM. It means a smarter one. We need to strip away the generic correlation rules that come out of the box and replace them with industry-specific logic.
For example:
Failed login from a new device + same user logs into net banking from known device within 2 minutes = probably fine.
Failed login from a new device + user then initiates a funds transfer to a first-time beneficiary = trigger high-priority alert.
This isn't rocket science. But most teams never customize their SIEM because they're too busy fighting fires.
What we can do differently: Before adding any new tool, we can spend time cleaning up our SIEM rules. Turn off what doesn't matter and tune what does. Only then can we move to SOAR and EDR.
Why SOAR Is Necessary?
SOAR gets sold as this magical automation layer that will replace your analysts. That's not true.
SOAR takes repeatable, boring, time-consuming tasks. It can handle them in seconds instead of minutes. Nothing more.
Let us give you a real-world example.
There was a private bank that had an old process for a phishing alert:
Analyst sees an alert in SIEM.
The analyst manually checks the endpoint.
The analyst opens a ticket in their IT system.
The analyst blocks the malicious URL in the proxy (if they remember the password).
The analyst sends an email to the affected user.
Total time: 12 to 15 minutes per alert. They were getting 30 to 40 such alerts daily. That's almost 8 hours of manual work….every single day.
One can implement SOAR with simple playbooks:
SIEM detects the phishing indicator.
SOAR automatically isolates the endpoint.
SOAR opens a ticket.
SOAR blocks the URL across all network controls.
SOAR sends a pre-approved email to the user and the analyst.
Total time: under 45 seconds. The analyst only steps in if the playbook fails or if the incident escalates.
Here's the catch: SOAR only works if your playbooks are written for your environment. Generic playbooks from vendors never fit. We must build them from scratch after watching how your analysts work.
Why Do Analysts Use EDR?
Ask any SOC analyst which tool they trust most. Most will say EDR.
Why? Because EDR tells you exactly what ran, what changed, what tried to call home, and what parent process started it all.
EDR is non-negotiable for BFSI. Your endpoints are everywhere… branch teller systems, ATM management consoles, employee laptops, even some old Windows 7 machine in a back office that IT forgot about. EDR sees all of them.
A recent example from an insurance client:
An attacker got past their email filter and convinced a claims processor to run a macro-enabled document. The macro launched PowerShell. PowerShell tried to download a remote access tool.
Their old antivirus didn't flag anything. But their EDR saw the process chain — Word → cmd.exe → PowerShell → network connection to an unknown IP — and killed it in under three seconds.
The analyst got one clean alert: "Suspicious PowerShell activity blocked. No further action required."
That's the difference between a good night's sleep and a weekend incident response. You need custom detection rules for BFSI-specific behaviors.
The Magic Happens When They Talk to Each Other
A standalone SIEM is a log viewer.
A standalone SOAR is a task runner.
A standalone EDR is a forensic tool.
A resilient SOC happens when all three are wired together properly.
EDR detects a suspicious file written to C:\Windows\Temp on a relationship manager's laptop.
EDR sends a high-fidelity alert to SIEM.
SIEM correlates: that laptop is in the "high-value" asset group, and the file hash matches a known ransomware family.
SIEM triggers a SOAR playbook.
SOAR isolates the laptop from the network, kills the process, resets the user's AD password, and opens a P1 ticket.
SOAR also sends a Teams message to the incident lead: "Ransomware blocked on RM laptop. User notified. No lateral movement detected."
Total time from file write to containment: 11 seconds.
No analyst touched it. No customer data was lost. No regulator was notified.
That's resilience.
What This Means for Your BFSI Organization
You don't need to rip out everything you have and start over. Most of our clients already own decent SIEM, EDR, or SOAR tools. They're just not integrated well.
The approach can be boringly practical:
Audit what you have - not just licenses, but what's actually configured and used.
Clean up your SIEM - stop ingesting junk, tune your rules, reduce alert fatigue by 60-70%.
Deploy EDR everywhere - no exceptions. Every endpoint, every server, every VM.
Build three SOAR playbooks to start - phishing, ransomware, and privileged account abuse. Don't automate everything. Automate what hurts the most.
Integrate in phases - first SIEM+EDR, then add SOAR for the top three alerts.
A Final Thought
Your SOC doesn't need more tools. It needs better teamwork between the tools you already have. SIEM watches. EDR protects. SOAR responds. When they work together silently in the background, your analysts stop firefighting and start hunting.
And that's when security becomes sustainable.
If you want to see how this works in your environment, reach out to us at SCS Tech India. We'll spend some time inside your system and give an honest assessment. It will be based on what's working and what's noise.
Because resilience isn't about buying the next shiny thing, it's about making what you have finally work together. Let's build that.
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Intelligenza artificiale e Cybersecurity Andrea Biraghi.
Intelligenza artificiale (IA) e CyberSecurity comunicano già su più livelli: l’utilizzo di tecnologie come l’IA e l’apprendimento automatico è diventato oramai essenziale per proteggere le organizzazioni da attori malintenzionati, che stanno sempre più veloci, migliorano e raffinano le loro tecniche di attacco per arrivare ai loro obiettivi.
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