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Information security has become an important aspect within organizations, especially those that enable digital transformation, such as the National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in the region, and therefore having services such as a SOC (Security Operations Center) that allow them to offer support to their communities has become a key issue.

A SOC enables management and improved security in a preventative way from the people, processes, and technology, but its implementation is a process that can take a lot of time and effort, especially if there is no clarity on what should be considered at the time of its compliance.

For this reason, on the initiative of the NRENs and with the support of RedCLARA, the eduLACSOC project aims to generate a model that supports the creation of SOCs in the NRENs of Latin America and the Caribbean. The project will be launched within the framework of the TICAL 2023 Conference, to be held in Panama from November 13 to 17, specifically during the Services Meeting.

In the first phase, efforts will focus on working on the following services within a SOC: Vulnerability Management, (D)DoS Monitoring and Mitigation, Malicious Activity Monitoring, and Security Information and Event Management, also known as SIEM. In the next step, the goal is to add other services and integration between the RNIEs' SOCs for information sharing and cybersecurity collaboration.

RedCLARA will act as the articulator of the project, which will be carried out jointly with the interested NRENs. Likewise, RNP (Brazil) will contribute its experience in the design and implementation of a SOC already available to its research and education community, in addition to its vast experience with its security incident response team, CAIS.

In addition, two of the participating networks that were the promoters of the eduLACSOC project, CUDI (Mexico) and REUNA (Chile), will be the pilot networks for the implementation and their feedback will be fundamental for the creation of these centers, sharing their experience with the incident response teams, CSIRT-CUDI and CSIRT-REUNA respectively, which are in a growth phase and intend to provide more and better services to their research and education communities in their respective countries.

As a result, it is expected to have an impact on the proactive and preventive security of the institutions associated with the participating NRENs and, secondly, to have an impact on other NRENs interested in replicating the model, since all the material and experience generated within this project will be published and presented within this community so that they can use it and implement a SOC that can serve their associated institutions.