Cyberattacks do not keep office hours. Sophos found in its 2026 Active Adversary Report that 88 percent of ransomware was deployed outside business hours, when nobody is watching. For a long time, having a dedicated team monitor for threats around the clock was something only large companies could afford. That is the job of a security operations center, usually shortened to SOC. This guide explains what a security operations center does, how it differs from the similarly named terms people confuse it with, and what it honestly costs to run. It also covers the realistic options for a small or mid-sized business, including SOC as a service.
What a security operations center is
A security operations center is a centralized team responsible for monitoring, detecting, investigating, and responding to cybersecurity threats across an organization’s systems. Where a normal IT team focuses on keeping systems running and fixing what breaks, a SOC concentrates specifically on finding and stopping threats, ideally before they turn into a breach. It is the part of your defenses that actively looks for an attacker rather than waiting for something to go obviously wrong, which is why a mature SOC works hand in hand with the rest of your cybersecurity solutions.
People, process, and technology
A working SOC is built from three parts together. People means trained security analysts who can tell a real threat from a false alarm. Process means the defined rules for how alerts are handled and how serious incidents get escalated. Technology means the tools that give the team visibility across your network, devices, and cloud services. Take any one of these away and the other two lose most of their value.
What a SOC does day to day
The work of a security operations center falls into a few repeating activities rather than one single task.
Monitoring and detection
The foundation is continuous monitoring, where the team collects and watches activity from across your environment and looks for anything unusual. The harder part is detection and triage, which means separating real threats from the constant background noise of harmless alerts so the real problems get attention. Fast, accurate detection depends on good information reaching the team from devices, email, cloud accounts, and the network, which is the core of a managed threat detection service.
Investigation and response
When a threat is confirmed, analysts move into investigation and incident response. They work out what is happening, contain it before it can spread, and remove the attacker’s access. Speed matters here more than almost anywhere else. In Sophos's 2026 data, attackers reached Active Directory, the system that controls every login on a Windows network, a median of about three and a half hours after getting in.
Threat intelligence and reporting
Around the daily work sits threat intelligence, which keeps the team current on the tactics attackers are using, and regular reporting, which matters especially for businesses that need to show regulators their security is working as intended.
SOC, SOC 2, and NOC: clearing up the confusion
Three similar sounding terms get mixed up constantly, and the difference is worth knowing before you compare services.
| Term | What it is | What it watches for | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| SOC (security operations center) | A team that monitors, investigates, and responds to threats | Attackers, malware, suspicious logins, data theft | Alerts handled and incidents contained, around the clock |
| SOC 2 report | An independent audit of a company's data protection controls | Whether controls are designed and working | A report you can show clients |
| NOC (network operations center) | A team that keeps systems available and performing | Outages, slow networks, failing hardware | Uptime and fast fixes for technical faults |
A SOC is not a SOC 2 report
A SOC 2 report is completely different from a security operations center. It is an independent audit that examines whether a company’s controls for protecting customer data are designed and operating properly, and it produces a report you can show clients. One is an active defense team, the other is a compliance document. You can read how that audit compares with other frameworks in our guide to SOC 2 versus HIPAA.
A SOC is not a NOC
A NOC, or network operations center, is a third thing again. It focuses on keeping systems available and performing well, such as uptime and network health, rather than on hunting security threats. Both watch your systems around the clock, but they are looking for very different problems.
The technology a SOC relies on
A security operations center runs on a few core types of tooling. At the center is usually a SIEM, short for security information and event management, which gathers logs and alerts from across your systems into one place so patterns become visible that no single device would reveal on its own. Our guide to managed SIEM covers how a small business gets one without running it. Alongside it sits endpoint detection and response, which watches the laptops and servers themselves, and increasingly extended detection and response, which ties signals from endpoints, network, email, and cloud together. None of these tools works on autopilot, though. They produce a flood of alerts that need skilled people to tune and interpret, which is the part that makes a SOC hard to run well.
The honest cost of running your own SOC
This is where many business owners are surprised. The headline challenge is not buying tools, it is staffing. Round-the-clock coverage cannot come from a single hire, because one person cannot work every hour of every day, so true 24/7 monitoring requires a rotating team of analysts working in shifts. The arithmetic is simple: a week has 168 hours and a full-time analyst works about 40, so keeping one person on shift at all times takes more than four full-time analysts before vacations, sick days, and turnover. In practice that means five or more people to staff a single seat.
On top of salaries, you are paying for the detection platforms, the threat intelligence feeds, and the constant work of tuning everything so the team is not buried in false alarms. Skilled analysts are also in short supply and expensive to keep. For most small and mid-sized businesses, building a full internal SOC is out of proportion to the size of the team it would protect. That is why smaller companies, including many across the San Fernando Valley, usually choose a managed approach instead.
SOC as a service and other options for a smaller business
The good news is that an in-house build is not the only way to get the protection a SOC provides. There are three main models, plus one service that is often sold alongside them, and the table below compares them.
| Model | Who does the work | Coverage | Cost pattern | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| In-house SOC | Your own analysts and tools | 24/7 only with five or more analysts | Salaries plus tooling, mostly fixed | Large organizations with strict control needs |
| SOC as a service | A provider's analysts watch your logs and alerts | 24/7 | Monthly subscription, usually per user or device | Small and mid-sized businesses without a security team |
| Managed detection and response (MDR) | A provider detects and acts on threats, usually starting from endpoints | 24/7, with hands-on containment | Monthly subscription | Businesses that want threats stopped, not just reported |
| Co-managed (hybrid) | Your IT staff plus a provider's SOC | Provider covers nights and weekends | Shared | Businesses with some internal IT capability |
Build it in-house
Running your own SOC suits larger organizations that have the budget and a real reason to keep everything internal, such as highly sensitive data or strict control requirements. For most smaller businesses, the cost and staffing demands make this the hardest path to justify.
Outsource to a managed SOC or MDR
The most common path for a smaller business is to outsource monitoring and response to a provider, often sold as a managed SOC, SOC as a service, or managed detection and response. This gives you access to a full team and mature tooling for a predictable subscription rather than a large fixed cost. Pairing it with 24/7 IT services covers both the availability and the security side at once.
Use a hybrid model
A hybrid arrangement keeps your internal staff handling day-to-day IT while a provider supplies the round-the-clock threat monitoring and the specialist response. It is a practical middle ground for businesses that have some internal capability but cannot realistically cover security around the clock on their own.
SOC as a service versus MDR
The two labels overlap, and providers use them loosely. The useful question is who acts when something is found. Some SOC services watch broadly across logs, email, cloud, and network and then alert your team, while MDR services usually start from endpoint tools and contain the threat themselves, for example by isolating a laptop. Our guide to managed detection and response covers what that hands-on response looks like.
How to decide what your business needs
The right model comes down to an honest look at your situation. Consider how sensitive the data you hold is, and whether you operate under regulations such as HIPAA or PCI DSS that raise the bar on monitoring and documentation. Weigh what an hour of downtime or a serious breach would cost you, because the higher that number, the more continuous detection is worth.
Also think about whether you could realistically hire and keep security analysts, and whether threats to your business are likely outside business hours, which for most companies they are. When an incident does happen, having a defined plan matters as much as detection, which is why a tested ransomware response plan belongs alongside whatever monitoring model you choose.
For medical and dental practices there is a compliance angle as well. The HIPAA Security Rule already requires regular review of information system activity, such as audit logs, access reports, and security incident tracking. A SOC is one practical way to meet that requirement and to keep evidence that the reviews happened.
Questions to ask a SOC provider
Labels like managed SOC and MDR tell you little on their own. These questions show what a provider will really do at three in the morning.
- When you confirm a threat, do you contain it yourselves, or only send us an alert?
- Which sources do you watch: endpoints only, or also Microsoft 365, email, firewalls, and cloud accounts?
- Are nights and weekends covered by people, or by automation that wakes someone up?
- How fast do you commit to respond to a critical alert, and is that in the contract?
- How long are our logs kept, and can we get them for a HIPAA review or a cyber insurance claim?
- If we leave, what happens to our data and the tools installed on our devices?
If you want to know which security operations center model fits your business without overpaying, GlobeVM can assess your setup and risks through managed IT services in Los Angeles.