Table of Contents
Organizations should consider outsourcing SOC operations when they face resource constraints preventing 24×7 coverage, struggle with talent gaps and difficulty hiring qualified analysts, need rapid security capability without months of building, lack expertise in emerging security domains like cloud or container security, experience budget limitations making in-house SOC costs prohibitive, want their internal team focused on strategic security priorities rather than alert triage, or face compliance requirements demanding continuous monitoring. Outsourcing makes particular sense for organizations where security isn’t a core competency and for those experiencing rapid growth outpacing their ability to scale security teams internally.
When to outsource SOC: Clear signals it’s time
The decision to outsource security operations center functions isn’t about admitting defeat—it’s about strategically allocating resources to achieve the best security outcomes. Several clear scenarios signal managed SOC services deserve serious consideration.
You can’t staff 24×7 operations effectively. Maintaining round-the-clock security coverage requires enough analysts to cover all shifts, weekends, and holidays without burning out your team. According to Gartner, organizations should “use MDR services to obtain 24×7, remotely delivered, human-driven security operations capabilities when there are no existing internal capabilities.” Building this coverage internally means recruiting, training, and retaining analysts through rotating shifts—a challenge many organizations simply can’t overcome.
The cybersecurity talent shortage is hitting you hard. With hundreds of thousands of unfilled security positions and intense competition for qualified candidates, many organizations cannot build the security teams they need. Even when you successfully hire analysts, retention becomes another challenge given high burnout rates in security operations. If you’re struggling to recruit or keep security talent, outsourcing provides immediate access to experienced professionals without recruitment headaches.
Your security team is drowning in alerts. When 90% or more of alerts close as benign after investigation, analysts spend the vast majority of their time on false positives rather than genuine threats. If your team faces overwhelming alert volume—or if they’re missing critical alerts buried in noise—this signals detection and triage processes need fundamental improvement managed services can provide.
Building a SOC costs more than your budget allows. Building a competent in-house SOC typically costs well over a million dollars annually—just to reach “good enough.” If security operations represent a significant portion of your security budget but aren’t delivering proportional value, outsourcing delivers similar capabilities at a fraction of the cost through subscription-based pricing.
You need security coverage quickly. Building an in-house SOC takes months to staff, equip, and operationalize. Modern managed SOC providers can start monitoring your environment within hours to days through API-based integrations. If speed to capability matters—whether due to compliance deadlines, recent incidents, or business growth—outsourcing provides immediate coverage.
Should I outsource security operations? Evaluating your situation
Not every organization needs to outsource their entire security operations function. Understanding your specific situation helps determine whether full outsourcing, hybrid models, or continued in-house operations make the most sense.
Consider outsourcing if you’re experiencing rapid growth. Business expansion creates security blind spots as your attack surface expands faster than your security team can scale. New cloud deployments, additional SaaS applications, remote offices, and increasing employee count all create monitoring challenges. Managed services scale alongside business growth without proportional resource investments or delays associated with hiring and training new analysts.
Your internal team needs to focus on strategic priorities. Security teams at many organizations spend 80%+ of their time on operational tasks—triaging alerts, investigating incidents, responding to threats—leaving little bandwidth for strategic work like security architecture, application security, or compliance initiatives. Outsourcing routine security operations frees internal teams to focus on security priorities unique to your business that only you can address.
You lack expertise in emerging security domains. The expanding range of security specializations—cloud security, container security, identity security, SaaS security—makes it impossible for small teams to maintain expertise across all areas. Even experienced security professionals struggle to stay current. Managed SOC providers bring specialized knowledge across diverse security domains without requiring you to hire specialists in every area.
Compliance requirements demand continuous monitoring. Many regulatory frameworks require 24×7 security monitoring and incident response capabilities with detailed documentation. Organizations facing these compliance requirements often find managed services the most practical way to satisfy continuous monitoring mandates without the overhead of building internal capabilities.
Your security tools aren’t delivering value. Organizations frequently invest in security technology that ends up underutilized—security tools gathering dust while teams are overwhelmed with alerts. Managed SOC providers work with your existing security stack, maximizing your technology investments and ensuring tools generate meaningful security value rather than just more noise.
Signs you need a managed SOC: Assessment framework
Beyond general scenarios, specific operational indicators often signal outsourcing deserves immediate consideration. These signs often appear gradually as organizations struggle with growing security demands.
Your mean time to respond exceeds one hour. If it takes your team more than an hour to investigate and respond to security alerts, attackers have too much time to accomplish their objectives. Leading managed SOC providers achieve MTTR under 20 minutes. When your response times significantly exceed industry benchmarks, this indicates process, tooling, or staffing gaps managed services can address.
Analysts are spending more than 50% of their time on false positives. This waste of analyst talent indicates poor detection quality and breeds frustration and burnout. Organizations implementing effective managed SOC services report reducing false positive rates from 99%+ with previous approaches to below 10%, transforming analyst experience and security effectiveness.
You lack coverage during off-hours. If your security monitoring stops when your team goes home for the night, you’re leaving significant vulnerability windows. The average time between initial compromise and detection—known as dwell time—gives attackers ample opportunity to move laterally, escalate privileges, and exfiltrate data. After-hours coverage represents one of the most common reasons organizations turn to managed services.
Your security tools aren’t integrated or talking to each other. Tool sprawl creates operational complexity and degrades security effectiveness. When analysts waste time switching between consoles and manually correlating data across disparate systems, outsourcing to providers who integrate your entire security stack delivers immediate efficiency gains.
Strategic security initiatives keep getting delayed. If your team constantly postpones important projects—security architecture improvements, application security programs, zero trust implementation—because they’re too busy handling operational work, this signals the operational burden needs addressing. Outsourcing routine operations creates bandwidth for strategic work only your internal team can accomplish.
When to use managed SOC services: Different organizational contexts
The decision to outsource varies significantly based on organizational size, security maturity, and business context. Understanding how different organizations approach this decision provides practical perspective.
Startups and early-stage companies often lack dedicated security staff entirely. For organizations with minimal in-house security capability, managed SOC services provide complete security operations coverage from day one. Rather than delaying security capability until you can afford to hire, outsourcing allows security operations to support business growth stages and scalability needs.
Small to mid-sized organizations (250-1,000 employees) face particularly acute challenges. Research shows this segment experiences especially high security alert fatigue—93% report work interrupting personal commitments, with 51% saying it happens all or most of the time. These organizations are large enough to face sophisticated threats but often lack resources to build comprehensive internal capabilities.
Growing technology companies experiencing rapid scaling find their security teams can’t keep pace. As organizations expand into new markets, add cloud services, or increase headcount, their attack surface expands exponentially. Managed services provide the flexibility to scale security coverage without the delays of hiring and training new analysts.
Organizations undergoing mergers, acquisitions, or divestitures face unique security challenges. During M&A activity, security teams must work within tight timeframes while integrating disparate systems, identifying redundant tools, and ensuring continuous coverage. Managed services provide rapid visibility across combined environments and reduce pressure on internal teams during transitions.
Established enterprises with existing SOCs increasingly use managed services in hybrid models. Your internal SOC might operate during business hours while the managed provider covers nights, weekends, and holidays. Or internal analysts strategically focus on tier-three investigations and strategic initiatives while the managed provider handles tier-one alert triage and first response.
Outsource vs. in-house SOC: Making the balanced decision
While outsourcing offers significant advantages, some organizations legitimately benefit from maintaining in-house security operations. Understanding when each approach makes sense requires an honest assessment of your situation.
You might not need to outsource if:
You have unique security requirements standard managed services can’t address. Highly specialized environments like industrial control systems, classified networks, or proprietary technology platforms may require internal security expertise with deep domain knowledge. Organizations in these situations often maintain internal SOCs with specialized capabilities.
Security is truly core to your business. Companies where security represents a competitive differentiator or fundamental business function—think security vendors, financial institutions handling extremely sensitive data, or critical infrastructure providers—may benefit from full internal control over security operations. However, even many of these organizations use hybrid models where managed services augment internal capabilities.
You’re a very large enterprise with the budget, resources, and ability to attract specialized talent. Organizations with 10,000+ employees and massive IT environments sometimes find building internal SOC capabilities makes economic sense at scale. Even here, many use managed services for specialized functions like cloud security or threat hunting while maintaining internal operations for other areas.
Your existing SOC is high-performing with manageable workload, meeting all security objectives, and maintaining healthy analyst utilization rates between 60-75%. If your team isn’t overwhelmed, your metrics are strong, and analysts aren’t experiencing burnout, continuing in-house operations makes sense. However, even well-performing SOCs benefit from external validation and may use managed services for augmentation.
The realistic assessment question: Can you recruit, train, and retain security analysts for 24×7 operations? What’s the local talent market like? Do you have a budget for comprehensive security operations? Will your team focus on operational work or strategic initiatives? Most organizations conclude that “security’s not a core part of my business, and there’s no way we’re going to become experts at it”—making outsourcing the practical choice.
SOC outsourcing decision: Framework for clarity
Making the outsourcing decision becomes clearer with a structured evaluation framework that considers multiple dimensions of your security program.
Assess your current state across these dimensions:
Resource capacity: Do you have sufficient budget, personnel, and time to build and maintain in-house security operations? Be realistic about costs—building even basic 24×7 capability requires significant investment in people, process, and technology with ongoing expenses that don’t decrease over time.
Talent availability: Can you recruit qualified security analysts in your geographic area? What’s local compensation for security roles? How long does hiring typically take? Given the severe talent shortage, many organizations cannot build the teams they need regardless of budget.
Coverage requirements: Do you need 24×7 monitoring? What’s your tolerance for after-hours gaps in coverage? Compliance requirements often mandate continuous monitoring and are difficult to staff internally.
Expertise depth: Do you need specialized knowledge across multiple security domains? Can you develop and maintain expertise internally across cloud security, threat hunting, incident response, and other specializations? The expanding security landscape makes comprehensive internal expertise increasingly difficult.
Operational maturity: Is your internal team spending time on strategic work or drowning in operational tasks? Organizations where security teams focus more on alert triage than strategic initiatives benefit from outsourcing routine operations.
Business priorities: Is security a core competency for your organization or a necessary support function? Where security isn’t central to your business value proposition, outsourcing often makes strategic sense.
The decision framework shouldn’t be binary. Many organizations find hybrid models most effective—maintaining some internal capabilities while outsourcing other security functions to managed services. Your internal team might handle security architecture and policy while the managed provider covers 24×7 monitoring and first-response activities.
Frequently asked questions
Can small companies have a SOC? Absolutely—and small companies often benefit even more from outsourced SOC services than large enterprises. The misconception that managed SOC is only for large organizations couldn’t be further from the truth. Small and mid-sized organizations face the same sophisticated threats as Fortune 500 companies but with far fewer resources to defend against them. Small companies present attractive targets precisely because they typically have weaker defenses. Rather than building an expensive in-house SOC, small organizations can subscribe to managed services that provide enterprise-grade security operations at a fraction of the cost.
When is in-house SOC better than outsourced? In-house SOC makes sense when security is truly core to your business operations and competitive positioning, when you have unique expertise requirements standard managed services can’t address (like classified networks or proprietary systems), when you’re a very large enterprise with budget and resources to attract specialized talent at scale, or when you have regulatory requirements mandating internal security operations. However, even organizations meeting these criteria increasingly use hybrid models where managed services augment internal capabilities rather than operating entirely in-house.
What if I already have a security team? Having a security team doesn’t mean you shouldn’t outsource—in fact, this hybrid model is increasingly common. Your internal team can focus on strategic security initiatives, architecture, and tier-three investigations while the managed provider handles routine 24×7 monitoring, alert triage, and first response. This approach addresses common struggles like analyst burnout, 24×7 coverage challenges and gaps during off-hours, and difficulty maintaining expertise across all security domains. Your team maintains control over strategic decisions while getting external help with resource-intensive operations.
How do I know if outsourcing is right for my organization? Consider outsourcing if you answer “yes” to three or more: Does it take your team more than an hour to investigate and respond to alerts? Are analysts spending over 50% of time on false positives? Do you lack coverage during nights, weekends, or holidays? Have you deployed security tools not used to full potential? Are you struggling to hire or retain qualified talent? Do you face compliance requirements for 24×7 monitoring? Is your business expanding faster than your security team can scale? Do you lack expertise in emerging areas like cloud security? If you’re answering yes to several of these, outsourcing likely makes strategic sense.
What triggers an outsourcing decision in most organizations? The most common triggers include a security incident revealing gaps in coverage or response capability, compliance audit findings requiring 24×7 monitoring, senior analyst departures creating staffing crises, business growth outpacing security team scaling, and executive recognition that security operations are preventing the team from strategic work. Many organizations also outsource during M&A activity when they need rapid visibility across combined environments or when divesting entities that need standalone security operations quickly.