What is SecOps?
SecOps, or security operations, is a collaborative practice that unites IT operations teams with security teams to protect critical business systems, data, and cloud infrastructure. For example, SecOps ensures that your organization collaboratively manages server patches, identity permissions, and incident response workflows. This integrated approach reduces blind spots and strengthens resilience against attacks.
How do SecOps teams make your organization safer?
SecOps teams strengthen cloud security through the following actions:
Identifying threats like malware infections, insider misuse, or cloud misconfigurations early
Reducing incident response time by coordinating security alerts and IT workflows
Improving compliance with frameworks like NIST, PCI DSS, and GDPR through consistent monitoring and reporting
As a result, SecOps minimizes downtime from security incidents, which improves overall business continuity.
Example: Following its merger, Vistra faced a sprawling and complex multi-cloud environment. Its SecOps team used Wiz to gain unified visibility across AWS and Azure, prioritize high-risk issues, and consolidate multiple point tools. This proactive visibility and streamlined governance helped the organization simplify its operations and reduce risk.
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What are the differences between SecOps, DevOps, and DevSecOps?
The chart below is a quick recap of three essential concepts in IT, software development, and security.
| Discipline | Primary goal | Focus and activities | Tools and practices | Key difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SecOps | Protecting systems and infrastructure | Identifies threats, coordinates incident response, enforces compliance, and manages risk | SIEM, SOAR, monitoring dashboards, patch management, and compliance reporting | SecOps is the team coordinating IT and security, with the SOC as the monitoring hub |
| DevOps | Optimizing software development | Streamlines CI/CD pipelines and automates testing, provisioning, and deployments to accelerate releases | CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (IaC), automated testing, and container orchestration | DevOps prioritizes speed and innovation, with security as an afterthought |
| DevSecOps | Securing software development | Embeds security throughout the SDLC and shifts security left with early testing and controls | SAST, DAST, IaC scanning, and automated security gates in CI/CD | DevSecOps is proactive and integrated into development, unlike reactive SecOps |
What is the SecOps methodology?
By understanding the differences between the different disciplines, you can improve your SecOps practice within your cloud security team ecosystem. SecOps spans both security and operations, so this team carries a wide range of responsibilities, such as:
Share information
Align on goals and priorities
Collaborate on incident response and improve security
Because these demands cover so much ground, SecOps teams should leverage automation wherever possible. Automation lightens workloads, speeds up responses, and reduces the risk of human error.
Below are several key tasks that SecOps teams handle, along with how they carry them out effectively and the benefits they provide.
Detecting threats: Build context and reduce noise
How to carry it out:
Consolidate threat intelligence from multiple feeds and your own environment.
Build and maintain an asset inventory so your team knows what you’re defending.
Correlate threat data with indicators of compromise and known exploits to eliminate false positives.
Prioritize threats based on risk so the team focuses on what matters most.
Benefits: Context-driven detection enables SecOps teams to avoid chasing false positives and respond quickly to real threats. Meanwhile, prioritization directs resources toward protecting critical workloads, which boosts both response speed and confidence.
How Wiz helps: Wiz’s Security Graph connects vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identities, and network exposures in a single view. With it, SecOps teams can spot toxic combinations that attackers could exploit. Wiz’s Threat Center also adds third-party feeds and Wiz Research so teams can cut through the noise and respond faster.
Managing vulnerabilities: Prioritize what matters most
How to carry it out:
Scan continuously for vulnerabilities across cloud resources, applications, and workloads.
Evaluate vulnerabilities by asking: (1) Can an attacker reach this from the internet? (2) Does it expose sensitive data? (3) Is there a known active exploit?
Assign ownership to DevOps and application teams to ensure they deploy fixes quickly.
Automate triage, ticketing, and remediation workflows to accelerate response.
Benefits: Strong vulnerability management lowers the chance of attackers exploiting known weaknesses. By implementing risk-based prioritization, you prevent wasted effort on low-impact issues, reduce burnout, and keep SecOps aligned with business goals, like uptime, compliance, and customer trust.
How Wiz helps: Wiz maps vulnerabilities across the environment and scores them according to their real-world impact. Its agentless scanning also delivers complete visibility, while its automated risk scoring helps teams fix the most dangerous exposures first. Additionally, Wiz equips developers with remediation guidance inside their workflows, which scales vulnerability management across the organization.
Ongoing security monitoring: Detect issues before they escalate
How to carry it out:
Monitor continuously for threats across networks, environments, and sensitive systems.
Investigate alerts promptly and verify whether they represent genuine risks.
Feed insights into response playbooks so the team improves with each detection.
Benefits: Proactive monitoring enables SecOps to spot issues before they escalate into full incidents. That’s why continuous visibility ensures that teams reduce downtime, protect sensitive data, and maintain compliance.
How Wiz helps: Wiz provides agentless visibility across cloud workloads, identities, networks, and data. It also continuously scans for misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and attack paths, enabling teams to detect risks in real time and respond before they become breaches.
Responding to incidents: Act fast with a plan
How to carry it out:
Build and test incident response playbooks in advance to ensure teams know how to react.
Automate containment and remediation steps whenever possible to minimize delays.
Assign clear roles and responsibilities across security and operations teams for faster collaboration.
Benefits: A practiced, automated incident response process reduces downtime, limits damage, and keeps business operations resilient. That way, teams can recover faster and demonstrate their readiness to regulators, customers, and leadership.
How Wiz helps: Wiz automatically maps incidents to their root cause through attack path analysis, which allows SecOps teams to see how threats move across environments. Its incident wizard also suggests next steps and enables cross-team collaboration, allowing teams to dramatically cut their response times.
Reporting and analytics: Turn findings into action
How to carry it out:
Generate reports for internal stakeholders, auditors, and regulators.
Preserve forensic data during and after incidents to support investigations.
Perform root cause analysis, document lessons you’ve learned, and update processes and tools.
Benefits: Clear reporting builds trust with leadership, regulators, and customers. Analytics enable teams to learn from past events, reduce recurring issues, and continually strengthen their security posture.
How Wiz helps: Wiz provides out-of-the-box compliance reports across more than 100 frameworks, along with contextual analytics from the Security Graph. This combination of reports and analytics gives teams a prioritized view of risks and evidence for audits, investigations, and ongoing improvement.
Below, you’ll find ways you can measure and analyze results.
We've discussed SecOps, DevOps, and DevSecOps—but you may also encounter the term SecDevOps. SecDevOps represents a strategic evolution in the DevOps pipeline, embedding security throughout the development lifecycle. Learn more about SecDevOps ->
Achieving SecOps maturity through continuous improvement
SecOps is a living program that shifts with new threats, growing infrastructure, and tighter compliance. Strong organizations treat it as continuous learning, not one-off incident response.
Achieving SecOps maturity requires measurable progress over time, supported by structured assessments that close gaps and drive resilience. Here’s how you can continuously improve:
Define and track SecOps KPIs and performance metrics
To prove that SecOps delivers business value, your team should define clear KPIs that directly tie to security and organizational goals. These metrics create visibility into program effectiveness and build the case for ongoing executive support.
Here are key metrics you can use:
Mean time to detect (MTTD): How quickly the team identifies incidents
Mean time to respond (MTTR): How fast the team remediates incidents once detected
Patch management cycle time: How long it takes for the team to apply fixes for critical vulnerabilities
False positive rate: How accurately the team tunes alerts and reduces noise
Compliance coverage: How effectively the team maps workloads to regulatory frameworks
Cost of incidents avoided: How the team preserves business continuity and reduces downtime
💡 Pro tip: Automate reporting for these KPIs wherever possible. Regular reviews not only validate progress but also link improvements directly to risk reduction and resilience gains.
Conduct periodic maturity assessments and gap analyses
Beyond daily operations, SecOps teams should also measure themselves against a structured maturity curve. For example, frameworks like NIST CSF tiers or internal benchmarks help organizations assess their capabilities across automation, monitoring, incident response, and cross-team collaboration.
Building a SecOps team
Building an effective SecOps team requires combining security expertise with operational knowledge. The most successful teams include professionals who understand both security threats and system operations, enabling faster threat detection and more effective incident response.
Cross-functional expertise proves more valuable than specialized silos. Security analysts with operational experience can better assess threat impact, while IT professionals with security knowledge can implement more effective defensive measures.
Core security roles
Security analyst: Detects, investigates, and responds to security incidents
Security engineer: Plans, builds, and maintains your security infrastructure; evaluates and tests vendor tools
Security manager: Oversees the SecOps team and overall security strategy
Operations-oriented roles
IT operations manager: Manages IT infrastructure and services
System administrator: Maintains and supports IT systems
System analyst: Analyzes IT systems and recommends improvements
Hybrid roles
Incident responder: Configures and monitors security tools; handles security incidents from detection to resolution
Threat intelligence analyst: Aggregates, analyzes, and shares information on potential threats
One other persona you’ll definitely need on board is the CISO or your organization’s equivalent. They probably won’t be directly involved in the day-to-day operations of the SecOps team, but when it comes to planning strategic direction, setting and adapting security policies, and ensuring alignment with overall business objectives, their buy-in is essential.
This is the "buck stops here" person for maintaining your company’'s end-to-end.end security posture. Plus, they can serve as the bridge between the SecOps team and the C-suite (executive) to ensure that everyone is on the same page while also advocating funding for SecOps projects.
Here’s how you can improve your SecOps maturity assessments:
Baseline current state: Document existing tools, processes, and responsibilities.
Benchmark performance: Compare current capabilities and metrics to industry standards or peers to highlight strengths and weaknesses.
Run gap analyses: Identify missing coverage, automation opportunities, or misaligned responsibilities.
Build actionable roadmaps: Prioritize critical investments, such as scaling automation or expanding detection capabilities.
Reassess regularly: Reevaluate performance annually or after major changes, such as mergers or cloud migrations.
🛠️ Action step: Treat each reassessment as both a progress check and a proof point to stakeholders that SecOps is advancing in maturity, not stagnating.
Building a SecOps team
What roles belong on a SecOps team?
An effective team requires a balanced mix of IT operations expertise and security specialization. IT professionals contribute deep knowledge of infrastructure performance, system reliability, and service continuity. At the same time, security experts bring specialized skills in threat detection, incident response, and the use of security frameworks and tools, like SIEM and SOAR. Together, these complementary perspectives enable SecOps teams and operation centers to manage risk without sacrificing operational efficiency.
It’s also beneficial to bring individuals on board with a background in both areas, such as a security analyst with IT operations know-how, to help your team better understand system behavior and potential vulnerabilities.
Here are several roles you may wish to consider as part of your SecOps team:
Core security roles
Security analyst: Detects, investigates, and responds to security incidents
Security engineer: Plans, builds, and maintains your security infrastructure, as well as evaluates and tests vendor tools
Security manager: Oversees the SecOps team and overall security strategy
Operations-oriented roles
IT operations manager: Manages IT infrastructure and services
System administrator: Maintains and supports IT systems
System analyst: Analyzes IT systems and recommends improvements
Hybrid roles
Incident responder: Configures and monitors security tools and handles security incidents from detection to resolution
Threat intelligence analyst: Aggregates, analyzes, and shares information on potential threats
One other persona you’ll need on board is the CISO (or your organization’s equivalent). While they likely won’t be directly involved in the day-to-day operations of the SecOps team, their buy-in is essential for planning strategic direction, setting and adapting security policies, and ensuring alignment with overall business objectives.
Ultimately, the CISO is accountable for maintaining the organization’s end-to-end security posture. Beyond setting strategy and policy, they act as the bridge between the SecOps team and executive leadership, ensuring alignment on security priorities, communicating risk in business terms, and securing budget and resources for SecOps initiatives.
DevOps Security Best Practices [Cheat Sheet]
In this 12 page cheat sheet we'll cover best practices in the following areas of DevOps: secure coding practices, infrastructure security, monitoring and response.
Download Cheat Sheet
SecOps training and skill development
A strong SecOps program relies on continuous skill development. As threats, tools, and environments evolve, your team needs ongoing training, not one-time workshops, to build confidence, sharpen readiness, and bridge the gap between IT and security roles.
Below are strategies you can use to implement effective training.
Ongoing threat-hunting programs: Task analysts with proactive hunts against live data to refine their detection skills and reduce over-reliance on alerts.
Tabletop exercises: Simulate real-world incidents to practice coordinated response, validate playbooks, and surface process gaps before a crisis.
Cloud-native security certifications: Encourage training in container security, Kubernetes hardening, and cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) practices to prepare for modern cloud threats.
Cross-training rotations: Rotate staff between operations and security roles to build hybrid expertise, strengthen collaboration, and reduce silos.
💡 Pro tip: Track participation and outcomes from each program to improve SecOps. For example, you can measure reductions in MTTD and MTTR after threat-hunting drills or tabletop exercises.
Why continuous training matters
Embedding training into daily operations keeps SecOps teams agile and resilient. Ongoing skill development helps close security gaps quickly, builds confidence during incidents, and improves collaboration across IT and security.
🛠️ Action step: To ensure continuous learning, integrate skill development into existing workflows. For example, you can make it part of sprint planning and SOC shifts, or after events like cloud migration milestones. Use insights from metrics to guide what your team learns, maintaining consistent readiness rather than relying on episodic approaches.
Key components: SecOps tooling
SecOps teams use a range of tools to perform diverse functions. Here are several that your team can use, too:
| Tool/Function | Description | KPIs |
|---|---|---|
| Endpoint detection and response (EDR) / Cloud detection and response (CDR) | EDR protects individual endpoints, while CDR extends detection and response into cloud environments. Both are essential in hybrid environments where endpoints and cloud workloads are interconnected. | MTTD, MTTR |
| Threat intelligence platform | Provides real-time intelligence on malware, adversary tactics, and attack methods to help teams proactively anticipate and neutralize threats. | Reduction in phishing and malware incidents, threat coverage accuracy |
| SIEM and SOAR | Aggregates and normalizes incoming security data for analysis, while automating incident response workflows and repetitive tasks. | False positive rate, alert triage time, automated response coverage |
| Network security tools | Enforces segmentation and access policies to protect data in transit and block unauthorized connections. | Blocked intrusion attempts, network uptime and availability, policy compliance rate |
| Vulnerability management | Correlates vulnerability data with business context to prioritize remediation, streamline patching cycles, and reduce overall risk. | Patch cycle time, average vulnerability age, risk reduction percentage |
There is a constant demand for new types of tools and capabilities, especially those that can handle security challenges related to AI, such as managing AI and ML models and deploying AI-centric apps faster and more securely. While this may sound complex, many modern solutions bring these tools together behind a single pane of glass and implement analytics and optimization to simplify complexity and reduce errors.
One such solution is a CNAPP, which provides a unified view of your cloud security posture and incorporates multiple SecOps tools for a more effective and consolidated approach.
Wiz: Turbo-charging SecOps with actionable insights
As an integrated CNAPP, Wiz unifies security solutions so you can build a safer and more secure multi-cloud environment. This provides SecOps teams with deep visibility into vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that attackers could exploit—across both infrastructure and applications.
As your organization accelerates cloud adoption, your SecOps team must understand broader cloud security challenges and the unique risks specific to their environment. Wiz delivers this context, enabling teams to investigate and respond faster.
Here’s how Wiz strengthens SecOps:
Comprehensive visibility
Scans resources across AWS, Azure, GCP, and other major providers
Covers VMs, containers, serverless functions, and databases
Unifies cloud assets and relationships in one view (via the Wiz Security Graph)
Risk prioritization
Automatically identifies critical vulnerabilities and misconfigurations
Surfaces toxic combinations of risks that create real attack paths
Provides a single risk queue so SecOps teams can address the most urgent threats first
Automated detection and response
Detect threats in real time across cloud workloads
Execute pre-built playbooks for common security scenarios
Automate evidence collection to accelerate investigations and audits
Cross-team collaboration
Project-based workflows to assign and resolve security tasks
Remediation guidance for developers and IT operations
Embedding security into the development lifecycle, reducing friction between teams
With prioritized, context-rich insights, Wiz enables security and IT teams to collaborate more effectively. That’s why over 50% of Fortune 100 companies already rely on Wiz to eliminate critical cloud risks and strengthen their SecOps capabilities.
Want to measure your response readiness? Get our free Template for Cloud Incident Response to map out your protocols when threats arise. Or, to enhance your multi-cloud environment, request a free Wiz demo today.
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