London – February 12th, 2018 – Sheffield Hallam and Edinburgh Napier Universities are opening state-of-the-art Security Operations Centres (SOC’s). The universities are teaming up with SOC specialist Satisnet and Honeycomb SOCAutomation to produce a next generation SOC that moves way beyond traditional security operations models – delivering Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) through SOCAutomation.
 
The mission being to move security operations into the world of being not just a monitoring platform but more a proactive; containment, prevention & self-learning environment that uses automation, machine learning and orchestration to scale and provide modern day security defence. The SOC will provide many preventative capabilities by default which includes the market-leading SOAR platform, SOCAutomation.
 
Satisnet’s Director, John McCann commented “these initiatives are at the forefront of Cyber Security training and innovation, our joint mission to work with organisations in the SOC and Cyber Training space to optimise people, processes and tooling”.
 
Alongside the SOC will run CyberKombat – a multi-user, multi-machine, multi-lab, cloud-based training environment aimed at skilling security personnel in real world Red/Blue security techniques. As well as SOCAutomation, the CyberKombat platform runs tools from leading security vendors such as; IBM, Carbon Black and ZeroFOX, as well as new innovative detection and protection technologies. Training will have the added value of having real world labs generating real-life attack/defence scenarios.
 
Principle Cyber Security lecturer Paul Wheway at Sheffield Hallam stated “this ground breaking SOC and security training initiative we are developing with Satisnet brings cyber security to all, we must not just be technical, we must also focus on management, end users and supply chain”.
 
Professor Bill Buchanan, who leads Edinburgh Napier’s Cyber Academy, says, “the collaboration with Satisnet highlights that we aim to use the most advanced systems and tools possible, and to train a wide spectrum of roles into how the (students?) can identify threats and then cope and respond to them”.
 
 
University Cyber Security SOC’s with SOCAutomation
 
The University SOC’s and Satisnet’s mission is to revolutionise the cyber security domain by applying workflow orchestration, automation and self-learning to keep up with the demands of modern day information security. They will utilise existing security tooling and IT infrastructure and apply Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR), Machine Learning and AI together with innovative training approaches that focus all organisational user areas. The tenet being that “a company is only as cyber secure as its weakest link”. The SOC’s will have a full schedule of workshop and training events and provide a fantastic information sharing opportunity to all contributing organisations.