What Are Managed SOC Services?

Even the most advanced security tools rely on the right people and processes to be effective. For security managers, the challenge lies in managing alert volume, maintaining 24/7 coverage, and ensuring incidents are investigated and contained quickly without overwhelming internal teams.

Security operations centers, or SOCs, centralize detection, response, and accountability. However, building and maintaining an in-house SOC requires significant investment in skilled talent and specialized tools. This level of operational maturity is difficult for many organizations to scale internally.

As a result, managed SOC services have become a core component of modern security programs. This blog explains what a SOC is, how managed SOC services work in practice, and what security leaders should consider when evaluating their security operations strategy.

What Is a Security Operations Center (SOC)?

A security operations center (SOC) is a centralized team responsible for monitoring IT infrastructure and detecting and responding to cybersecurity incidents around the clock. The center builds and maintains the processes and security architectures used to unearth, analyze, and handle threats in real time. Think of it as a command center for your organization’s cyber defense.

What Are Managed SOC Services?

Managed SOC services are subscription-based offerings that allow companies to outsource their security operations to a third-party provider. Also known as SOC as a service (SOCaaS), managed SOC can be leveraged as a standalone service or as a core component of managed detection and response (MDR) services, which pair AI-powered detection with expert-led incident response.

In practice, SOCaaS serves as the operational backbone for security operations, while MDR typically layers technology-driven detection and response capabilities on top of that foundation.

Even businesses with existing security teams can benefit from managed SOC services. The service can fully manage security operations, allowing in-house teams to focus on more strategic initiatives, or act as an extension of your team.

How Important Is Managed SOC in Cybersecurity?

Managed SOC has become a highly important part of cybersecurity strategies in recent years. As the cybersecurity workforce shortage continues to widen, organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to hire and retain skilled security professionals. This talent gap often results in limited monitoring coverage, slower incident response, and dangerous blind spots across the security environment.

A managed SOC provider helps close skills gaps by augmenting internal resources with always-on security analysts and advanced detection and response tools.

According to the World Economic Forum, the cyber threat landscape is also becoming more complex due to emerging technologies, cybercriminals with more refined skills, and greater cyber capabilities to levy threats. Bad actors don’t keep a 9-to-5, so businesses need to be prepared for these threats 24/7/365. This complexity, as well as the need to continuously adapt the evolving attack vectors, makes managed SOC a valuable companion service to any organization.

Key Components of Top SOC as a Service Companies

All SOCaaS providers can offer slightly different resources, but these key components should be present. 

Security Strategy Advisory

SOCaaS is often misunderstood as little more than eyes on glass. However, visibility without action provides little real protection. Managed SOC providers serve as partners for your organization, helping you assess risk, guide security investments, and ensure logging and reporting meet compliance requirements. This advisory engagement is sometimes offered as a distinct service, such as through a Technical Account Manager (TAM), to support a regular, continuous security dialogue.

Continuous Monitoring and Rapid Response

Top-tier providers provide round-the-clock monitoring, but they also focus on the speed and the quality of the response. A managed SOC team will constantly surveil your network and run human-led triage efforts, distinguishing between benign software updates and malicious moves. From there, they can engage in containment actions, including isolating devices and disabling accounts that have been compromised.

Threat Intelligence and Analysis

Understanding what’s happening with your data is only one piece of the puzzle. External SOC teams also stay up-to-date on threat intelligence feeds to understand what emerging attacker tactics and zero-day vulnerabilities could impact your business. After a security incident, these teams can also conduct root cause analysis, deeply understanding how attackers got in and working to prevent similar threats and attacks from surfacing in the future.

Integration with Cybersecurity Tools

Outsourced SOC teams enhance their skills by incorporating advanced technologies. These include:

• AI and machine learning tools for anomaly detection
• Security information and event management (SIEM) to collect and correlate logs
• Endpoint or extended detection and response (EDR/XDR) to provide deep visibility into individual devices or the broader environment

These tools can help further centralize data, automate otherwise manual tasks, and remotely disable certain capabilities during a breach.

Recovery Support

To ensure business continues as usual, SOC providers also offer recovery support if a breach occurs. Remediation guidelines and actions can include removing malware or patching vulnerabilities, restoring services from clean backups, and conducting post-incident reviews, complete with lessons learned. 

What Are the Benefits of a Managed SOC Service?

For security managers, the value of a managed SOC is measured in operational outcomes. These services are designed to reduce attacker dwell time, improve mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR), and limit unnecessary escalations to internal teams. By clearly defining ownership and response workflows, a managed SOC also improves accountability and creates cleaner handoffs during security incidents.

Managed SOC services can greatly surpass the capabilities of an internal security team, offering 24/7/365 protection, faster threat detection and response, and advanced expertise and technologies, all for typically lower costs and greater flexibility than organizations can get in-house.

Around-the-Clock Protection

Many organizations tend to hire cybersecurity staff on a normal 9-5 schedule. Even if they have extended hours, this typically means coverage for 12-hour shifts, sometimes without staffing for weekends or holidays. Managed SOC providers equip your team with 24/7/365 monitoring, so no matter when a threat emerges, there are certified security experts available to detect it and address it.

Faster Detection and Response

With expert analysts monitoring environments around the clock, managed SOC services significantly improve MTTD and MTTR, reducing the amount of time attackers can remain undetected in a network. This greatly reduces dwell time, or amount of time an attacker can remain undetected in a network. Beyond watching for threats, some managed SOC providers also staff cyber threat hunters who proactively search for suspicious activity, including hidden signs of breaches, before alerts even appear.

Access to Expertise and Advanced Technologies

Even skilled teams can have some knowledge gaps. SOCaaS can fill expertise and technology gaps in your current team and tech stack, giving you more access to Tier 1-3 analysts, forensic investigators, and threat hunters who can be expensive or difficult to come by.

Beyond individual expertise, a managed SOC delivers something tools alone cannot: human insight informed by a global threat landscape. While SIEM, EDR, XDR, and MDR solutions provide powerful visibility and detection, a SOC learns from every environment it protects. When an attack attempt is detected and stopped in one region, a SOC rapidly translates those insights into proactive defenses elsewhere, often before the threat ever reaches your network.

These teams also provide real-time insights by integrating SIEM, EDR, and XDR tools, along with compliance support for organizations subject to PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and other regulatory requirements. Advanced tooling helps reduce alert fatigue by filtering out noise and minimizing false positives.

Together, this combination of collective intelligence, human expertise, and advanced tooling reduces unnecessary escalations, improves investigation quality, and frees internal teams to focus on higher-value security initiatives.

Cost Efficiency

Instead of worrying about paying for internal staff to constantly scan for potential threats, managed security services means you get protection all day and night without the cost of maintaining an around-the-clock team. This can result in significant cost savings without sacrificing coverage. The advanced approaches and reduced time spent on false alarms can also focus efforts on actual threats, making security budgets more effective. 

Scalability and Flexibility

It is also much easier to scale up and down with an external team than with an in-house cybersecurity department. When your environment grows, you can scale threat monitoring services without hiring more staff.  You can also allow your team to be more flexible by leveraging co-managed models in which SOCaaS focuses on 24/7 monitoring, while your in-house expertise concentrates on higher-level strategic initiatives with clearly defined ownership, escalation paths, and accountability.

Choosing a Managed SOC vs. In-House SOC

Whether a managed or in-house SOC is best for your organization will depend on a number of factors. These include:

• Your business size
• Your security budget
• The in-house skills you have available
• How much control you want in the security operations process

Internal teams can mean greater sovereignty and control, but they can be a significant investment that wind up too expensive for smaller businesses. Consider what you want to accomplish with a SOC in terms of cost, coverage, control, and compliance, and you will be able to decide whether a managed or in-house SOC will suit your needs better.

Key Considerations When Selecting a Managed SOC Service Provider

If you have evaluated your current situation and have decided that choosing a managed SOC service provider is right for you, consider the following when deciding from a list of vendors.

Reputation and Track Record

A demonstrated history of successful cybersecurity experience is one of the most important factors to evaluate. Verify that your provider practices what they preach by learning about their certifications (SOC Type II report, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS) and their response service level agreements (SLAs).

How well does this vendor understand your specific regulatory threat landscape? How fast is their threat detection and remediation process? Ask about their MTTD and MTTR. It’s also important to understand what’s guaranteed in the SLA, including the response SLA.

Technology and Tools Used

What does the vendor’s tech stack look like? Do they use SIEM, AI, or EDR/XDR? How do they use the technology they have to correlate data across an environment and choose the key actions to take? This might also include how they use security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) tools to automate and contain known threats.

Additionally, are their tools proprietary or open-source? If you choose a different vendor or move the team in-house later on, this question will be important to understand whether your business will need to adapt to new tools. 

Integration with Existing Security Infrastructure

How can the vendor work with your existing investments to enhance them instead of replacing them? You’ll want to know whether the SOC tools are bi-directional and can talk to the ones you currently have, such as your firewall. SOC teams that have API-first approaches can be helpful because they use APIs to ingest data from your current sources into their tools, which means you won’t have to switch the tools you’re currently using. 

Hybrid Cloud or Multicloud Expertise

In what ways is this vendor cloud-native? They should be able to monitor hybrid and multicloud environments, looking across on-premises servers as well as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud environments. What is their approach to monitoring a perimeter and performing identity and access management (IAM) for suspicious behavior?

Upgrade Your Security Posture with TierPoint’s Adapt SOCaaS

As the complexity and speed of cyber attacks increases, a managed security operations center can help you strengthen your security measures with proactive human expertise. TierPoint’s Adapt SOC as a Service (SOCaaS) augments your team with 24/7/365 monitoring, rapid response, and recovery support, expanding protections while allowing your experts to focus on other projects.

Learn more about how our Adapt Platform and SOCaaS service can elevate your security systems, giving your team and customers peace of mind.

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