Walk me through how you would design and maintain an effective SOC monitoring strategy for a hybrid environment (on‑prem and cloud). Which data sources, use cases, and detection logic would you prioritize, and why?

Question

VirtualInterview.AI · Accepted Answer

For a hybrid environment, I start from the crown jewels and work backward. If we’re protecting, say, ERP on‑prem and customer data in Azure and AWS, I’d prioritize: identity logs (AD, Entra ID, Okta), endpoint telemetry (EDR across servers and workstations), and cloud-native logs (CloudTrail, Azure Activity, VPC/NSG flows) into a single SIEM. In my last role, we onboarded about 15 key data sources and focused first on high-value use cases: privileged account abuse, anomalous MFA activity, risky OAuth grants, and data exfiltration from S3 and Azure Storage. I like a mix of rules-based detections (known bad patterns, MITRE mappings) plus behavioral analytics for baselining logins and data access. We reviewed detection performance monthly, tuning out noisy rules that generated more than 90% false positives and enriching alerts with asset criticality. That approach cut alert volume by roughly 40% while increasing our true positive rate and keeping MTTR under 2 hours for high-severity incidents.

Sample Answer

Keywords