SOC Prime Team Stories: Nick Saucier

From Battlefield to Cyber Frontier— Equipped With Collaborative Expertise

At SOC Prime, we are united by a common mission to strengthen cyber defense capabilities worldwide. Our international team includes employees from Asia, Europe, North and South America, and Australia connected by the common thread of cybersecurity and eagerness to contribute to a safer digital future using their unique and varied expertise. Our globally distributed team has significantly grown, having reached the milestone of 100 employees at the turn of 2022 and staying on target to be 160 strong by the end of 2023. 

Nicholas Saucier joined SOC Prime to strengthen the Sales Engineering Team at the end of November 2021. Sharing his inspiring story and unique background that brought him to SOC Prime sheds light on how and why our collaborative model empowers and accelerates skills and provides the tools that a willing cybersecurity practitioner can leverage for professional and personal success.  

“Since the very beginning of my cybersecurity journey, my mission was getting maximum utility out of my clients’ SIEMs, fortifying their defenses with timely and relevant detections, hunting for the behaviors of adversaries, and briefing their leadership. For me, SOC Prime was a key component to mission success. I never envisioned myself becoming a technical professional, however, I was able to proceed without hesitation as SOC Prime blazed an extremely effective path forward. It is a guiding light for cyber defenders worldwide.”

Nick Saucier, US Sales Engineer at SOC Prime

Nicholas joined the US Army as an Infantryman after graduating from High School. After three years of specialized training, Nicholas was deployed to Kandahar, Afghanistan, as a member of a Sniper Team. Looking back on his military background, over a decade later, he would realize how many lessons he could draw from that time and how much relevance they had to success as a cybersecurity defender. Nick’s experience combating Asymmetric Warfare perfectly matched the daily Analyst’s routine which requires regular research into Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) on the cyber battlefield. His acquired skills for understanding enemy Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs), finding gaps and vulnerabilities in defense, maintaining discipline and morale are all extremely relevant for the skill set required to succeed on the cyber frontier. 

After leaving the army in 2011, Nicholas aspired to start his own business manufacturing ammunition, which led him to study Industrial Engineering specializing in Tool & Gage making. After five successful years of acquiring engineering skills, he felt called to transition to cybersecurity and join the ranks of cyber defense. 

Nicholas started his cybersecurity journey as an Associate Security Consultant for a large MDR/MSSP where he primarily worked with security administration of multiple SIEMs. He often struggled with the common hurdles cybersecurity practitioners are challenged with having to work across multiple SIEM platforms, with various clients across different industry verticals all with diverse levels of maturity. He quickly realized the scale of challenges cybersecurity practitioners face on a daily basis. The primary challenges involved rapid development and deployment required to continuously update and deliver content across multiple SIEMs aimed at keeping pace with a dynamically changing attack surface, building a proactive Threat Hunting team with MITRE ATT&CK® as its foundation, and the constant challenge of employee retention and continuous skills development.

In the summer of 2017, Nick’s colleague introduced him to a new cybersecurity solution, a platform dedicated to threat research, threat hunting, and the near real-time delivery of threat detection content. This was the first time Nick engaged with SOC Prime Platform. He immediately recognized it as a solution to multiple challenges he had faced in the industry. By delving into the platform, Nick drew more parallels from his previous trades, realizing that a stumbling block to success was a lack of unit cohesion and collaboration. SOC Prime’s approach to collaborative cyber defense clicked with Nick. He found it to be a key missing ingredient to the future of cyber defense.

SOC Prime seemed like “an oasis in a desert” as Nick sought content and education to further his own personal development and manage multiple client needs. Realizing that standard rule sets based on IOCs were not enough to boost cyber defense capabilities along with the challenges of research-develop-refine detection content, Nicholas started to advocate internally for adopting SOC Prime Platform into his team’s operational workflow. He demonstrated how implementing SOC Prime Platform could streamline the existing operations and create new service offerings. The platform changed his perspective on operations and gave him a new outlook on cybersecurity. 

Five years further on, Nick finds himself a contributing member of SOC Prime. 

Nick never envisioned himself being a sales engineer when he joined SOC Prime at the end of 2021. When the opportunity presented itself, he leapt at the chance realizing that the power of collaboration, once a beacon for himself, is also a guiding light for cyber defenders worldwide. From now on, he is armed with defensive security tools and shared expertise of the global cybersecurity community to combat threats in the cyber domain. 

As a SOC Primer, Nick has joined the global cyber defender ranks while fostering the adoption of the world’s largest and most advanced platform for collaborative cyber defense. Powered by the joint efforts of our global team, SOC Prime continues to drive its core mission to transform threat detection and contribute to a safer future.