Book excerpt: Practitioners in Cybersecurity community understand that they are an unending war with opponents who have varying interests, but are mostly motivated by financial gains. New vulnerabilities are continuously discovered, new technologies are continuously being developed, and attackers are innovative in exploiting flaws to gain access to information assets for financial gains. It is profitable for attackers to succeed only few times. Security Operations Center (SOC) plays a key role in this perpetual arm wrestling to ensure you win most of the times. And if you fail once in a while, you can get back very quickly without much damage. People, who are part of SOC planning, architecture, design, implementation, operations, and incidents response will find this book useful.Many public and private sector organizations have built Security Operations Centers in-house whereas others have outsourced SOC operations to managed security services providers. Some also choose a hybrid approach by keeping parts of SOC operations in-house and outsourcing the rest of it. However, many of these efforts don't bring the intended results or realize desired business outcomes.This book is an effort to learn from experiences of many SOC practitioners and researchers to find practices that have been proven to be useful while avoiding common pitfalls in building SOC. I have also explored different ideas to find a "balanced" approach towards building a SOC and making informed choices between functions that can/should be kept in-house and the ones that can be outsourced. Even if you are an experienced SOC professional, you will still find few interesting ideas as I have done significant research and interviewed many SOC professionals to include tips to help avoid pitfalls.