Detect. Respond. Report on the federal clock.

The federal SOC carries authorities a commercial SOC does not

A federal Security Operations Center is not a commercial SOC with a different log source list. It operates under FISMA Section 3554 incident reporting authority, the US-CERT Federal Incident Notification Guidelines (one-hour notification for major incidents to CISA), CISA Binding Operational Directives — including BOD 22-01 on Known Exploited Vulnerabilities and BOD 23-02 on internet-exposed management interfaces — Emergency Directives, the National Cyber Incident Response Plan (NCIRP), and the agency's Authorization to Operate boundary.

Precision Delivery Federal engineers federal SOCs that meet those authorities by design. Detection content is mapped to MITRE ATT&CK and to the threats called out in CISA AA advisories. SOAR playbooks are wired to the federal incident notification clock, not a SLA invented by a vendor. CDM feeds populate the agency dashboard and roll up to the CISA Federal Dashboard. Evidence is preserved for OIG audit and for FISMA annual assessment.

SIEM: Splunk Enterprise Security and Microsoft Sentinel

The two SIEMs we engineer in production federal environments are Splunk Enterprise Security on Splunk Cloud GovCloud and Microsoft Sentinel in Azure Government or GCC High. Each has a clear sweet spot.

Splunk Enterprise Security on Splunk Cloud GovCloud

Splunk Cloud GovCloud is FedRAMP High authorized and DoD IL5 ready. We deliver Enterprise Security with: tuned data models for Common Information Model (CIM) compliance, Risk-Based Alerting (RBA) with risk objects on entities, the MITRE ATT&CK app for Splunk for technique-level coverage, the Splunk SOC Operations Suite for case management, and Splunk SOAR for playbook automation. Detection content is version-controlled in Git with Splunk's Content Pack workflow and deployed via CI/CD into the production search heads.

Microsoft Sentinel in Azure Government and GCC High

For agencies already on Microsoft 365 GCC High the natural SIEM is Sentinel because every Defender product (Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Identity, Defender for Cloud Apps, Defender for Office 365), Entra ID, Purview, and Defender for Cloud streams natively. We deliver Sentinel with: KQL detection rules version-controlled in a Sentinel Repository connected to Azure DevOps or GitHub, Analytics Rule templates from the Microsoft Sentinel Content Hub plus custom content, UEBA enabled with risk scoring on user and entity entities, Watchlists for threat intel and asset context, Workbooks for executive and tactical dashboards, and Automation Rules with Logic Apps for SOAR.

SOAR: from alert to action without a human in the middle of every step

SOAR is where federal SOCs save hours. We build playbooks in Splunk SOAR (formerly Phantom), Microsoft Sentinel Automation, Tines, or Cortex XSOAR depending on the agency's stack. Every playbook is documented, version-controlled, peer-reviewed, and tested against synthetic alerts before going live.

Common federal playbooks we deliver: phishing triage with URL detonation in a sandbox (Joe Sandbox, ANY.RUN, Microsoft Defender Submissions); credential compromise response with automated Entra ID or Okta session revocation, password reset, and MFA reset; CISA KEV ingestion against asset inventory with auto-ticket creation in ServiceNow for any matched assets; suspicious endpoint isolation through Defender for Endpoint or CrowdStrike Falcon Real Time Response; and federal incident notification draft generation that pre-populates the US-CERT notification template for the watch officer to validate and send within the one-hour window.

MITRE ATT&CK coverage as a measurable program

Every detection rule we author is tagged with one or more ATT&CK techniques and sub-techniques. Coverage is measured weekly using the MITRE ATT&CK Navigator and DeTT&CT, with two heatmaps published to SOC leadership: techniques covered by detection content and techniques exercised by recent purple team or red team activity. Coverage gaps drive sprint planning. We also publish an Adversary Emulation Plan for the agency's top three threat actors based on CISA threat profiles or agency-specific intel — typically a tier-one APT, a ransomware-affiliated crew, and an insider scenario — and run the corresponding emulation through Atomic Red Team or CALDERA to validate the detections in production.

Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM)

The CDM Program Office at CISA requires agencies to feed asset and vulnerability data into the agency CDM dashboard and onward to the CISA Federal Dashboard. We integrate the major CDM sensor categories:

• Hardware Asset Management. Tanium, Forescout, BigFix, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint device inventory, ServiceNow CMDB.
• Software Asset Management. Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, Tanium Discover, Defender for Endpoint software inventory.
• Configuration Settings Management. Tenable.sc with SCAP content, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Secure Score for Devices, BigFix Compliance.
• Vulnerability Management. Tenable.sc and Tenable.io, Qualys VMDR, Rapid7 InsightVM, Defender Vulnerability Management.

Sensor outputs are normalized through the CDM Data Exchange Layer (DXL) into the agency dashboard. We deliver the dashboard content with executive views (mission risk by system), operational views (open critical vulnerabilities by asset owner), and the AWARE score (Agency-Wide Adaptive Risk Enumeration) implementation per CDM PMO guidance.

Federal incident notification on the clock

The US-CERT Federal Incident Notification Guidelines require notification of CISA within one hour of a major incident. The clock starts at incident determination, not at end-of-investigation. We engineer the SOAR layer so that as soon as a major incident is declared in the case management system, the notification draft is pre-populated with: incident category (CAT 0-9), affected information impact (NIST SP 800-61), recoverability category, current severity, and impacted high-value assets. The watch officer validates and sends; the system records the timestamp into the federal evidence trail.

Threat intelligence integration

The SIEM consumes federal threat intel through the CISA Automated Indicator Sharing (AIS) feed in STIX/TAXII format, the relevant ISAC/ISAO feeds (MS-ISAC for state-local-tribal-territorial-adjacent agencies, FS-ISAC for treasury and financial regulators, Health-ISAC for HHS components), commercial feeds (Recorded Future, Mandiant Threat Intelligence, CrowdStrike Falcon Intelligence), and open source (MISP communities, Abuse.ch). See our Threat Intelligence capability for the full intel stack.

How we build

1. Telemetry inventory. What logs exist, where they go, what fidelity they carry, what's missing. We score against the MITRE ATT&CK Data Sources catalog.
2. Detection content baseline. Deploy the agency-relevant content packs (Splunk ES Content Update, Sentinel Content Hub) and tune for the environment.
3. SOAR playbook library. Build the top ten federal playbooks first: phishing, credential compromise, ransomware indicator, KEV match, lateral movement, data exfiltration, insider risk, malware on endpoint, suspicious admin activity, federal notification draft.
4. CDM integration. Stand up sensor feeds, normalize through DXL, populate agency dashboard, validate roll-up to CISA Federal Dashboard.
5. ATT&CK coverage measurement. Publish the heatmap, run the emulation, close the gaps in sprints.
6. Tabletop and live-fire. Run quarterly tabletops with agency leadership and live-fire exercises against the SOC. Every gap becomes a content engineering ticket.

Federal context and past performance

Bo Peng holds Kaggle Top 200 global ranking and seven cloud certifications across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Precision Delivery Federal delivered production data engineering on SAMHSA platforms and is SAM.gov registered (UEI Y2JVCZXT9HP5, CAGE 1AYQ0). We pursue SBIR SOC modernization topics across CDAO, DISA, and civilian agencies. See our DoD playbook, CISA playbook, and 2026 federal AI contract trends.

Tooling we work with

• SIEM: Splunk Enterprise Security on Splunk Cloud GovCloud, Microsoft Sentinel in Azure Government and GCC High, Elastic Security, Chronicle SIEM (Google Cloud).
• SOAR: Splunk SOAR, Microsoft Sentinel Automation with Logic Apps, Tines, Cortex XSOAR, Swimlane.
• EDR/XDR: Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity, Palo Alto Cortex XDR, Tanium Threat Response.
• Vulnerability management: Tenable.sc/Tenable.io, Qualys VMDR, Rapid7 InsightVM, Defender Vulnerability Management.
• Asset and configuration: Tanium, Forescout, BigFix, ServiceNow CMDB.
• Threat intel platforms: Recorded Future, Mandiant Advantage, ThreatConnect, MISP, OpenCTI.