SOCaaS vs MSSPs: Which Security Model Fits Your Organization
By N‑able
A ransomware alert fires at 2 a.m. Your MSSP sends you a notification. Now you’re scrambling to find someone who can actually do something about it. That gap between “we detected a threat” and “we stopped a threat” is the difference between SOCaaS and traditional MSSPs.
Both models promise security coverage, but they deliver fundamentally different outcomes. One monitors and alerts. The other quarantines infected hosts and revokes compromised credentials before you finish reading the notification.
This guide breaks down the core differences between SOCaaS and MSSPs, what each model actually delivers, and how to evaluate whether the investment makes sense for your organization.
The Core Difference: Monitoring vs Action
Understanding what each model actually delivers helps you avoid buying monitoring when you need a response.
Traditional MSSPs monitor and alert, then hand the problem to you. Industry analysis shows the majority of surveyed MSSPs provide 24/7 security event monitoring and alerting, while a smaller percentage offer full Security Operations Center as a Service capabilities with active response. Your MSSP spots a potential breach. Now what? Your team handles everything: triaging alerts, making response decisions, determining escalations, conducting forensics, managing recovery.
SOCaaS handles your entire security operation. The key capability is “remote mitigative response,” meaning disruption and containment actions taken without waiting for customer approval. SOCaaS providers handle the Detect and Respond functions plus partial Recover function assistance. You retain responsibility for strategic Identify and Protect functions: asset management, risk assessment, and architectural security controls.
Ask any provider this question: “Do you quarantine hosts and deauthenticate users without requiring our approval for each action?” If yes, you’re looking at true SOCaaS or MDR with active response. If no, you’re looking at a traditional MSSP with a monitoring-only scope.
N‑able Adlumin MDR combines AI-powered detection with 24/7 SOC analyst support, delivering automated remediation for the majority of threats while providing human expertise for complex incidents.
What SOCaaS Delivers
Technology-only offerings miss the human-driven response that separates operational security from alert forwarding. SOCaaS delivers round-the-clock security operations meeting CISA’s federal benchmarks through three core capabilities working together.
SIEM infrastructure serves as your security nerve center, correlating logs and catching threats across your entire environment. SIEM platforms correlate security data from endpoints, networks, and cloud environments, serving as the primary source for security alerts in most organizations.
EDR and XDR capabilities provide extended detection across endpoints, networks, cloud environments, and identity systems, delivering visibility across the full attack surface.
Active incident response handles investigation, containment, eradication, and recovery as part of standard service delivery, not escalated exceptions. This is the critical differentiator from monitoring-only services.
Where Traditional MSSPs Still Fit
Not every organization needs active response capabilities, and not every budget supports SOCaaS pricing.
Traditional MSSPs work well for organizations that already have internal security staff capable of handling incident response but need help with 24/7 monitoring coverage. They also fit organizations with compliance requirements that mandate external monitoring but allow internal response, and those with budget constraints that prevent SOCaaS adoption in the near term.
The capability gap between monitoring-only MSSPs and full SOCaaS reveals the trade-off clearly. Traditional MSSPs give you more vendor options and potentially lower costs, but you own the response function entirely. When your MSSP sends an alert at 3 a.m., someone on your team needs to wake up and handle it. If you don’t have that capability, monitoring-only creates a dangerous gap between detection and response.
What Stays In-House
SOCaaS doesn’t eliminate internal security staff. It transforms their function from operational firefighting to strategic oversight.
Industry analysts note that effective 24/7 Security Operations Center coverage requires substantial staffing to cover shifts, vacations, and specialized roles. Direct labor typically represents the largest portion of SOC operational costs. ISC2’s Cybersecurity Workforce Study documents a global workforce gap of nearly 4.8 million positions. For MSPs and mid-market enterprises competing against large enterprise salaries, assembling the professionals required for internal SOC operations becomes practically impossible.
Analyst burnout compounds this challenge: research indicates the majority of SOC analysts experience burnout, with many likely to change jobs within the next year. Each departure triggers months of recruitment and ramp-up time.
With SOCaaS handling 24/7 operations, a mid-market organization needs one to five internal security professionals focused on strategic functions rather than alert triage.
Functions That Require Internal Ownership
Even with SOCaaS handling operations, you need internal ownership of several strategic functions.
Strategic security leadership requires a CISO or security director to handle organizational security strategy, board-level reporting, and SOCaaS provider performance management. This role ensures security investments align with business objectives.
Governance, risk, and compliance functions demand internal oversight for regulatory frameworks like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and GDPR. Audit coordination and third-party risk assessment need someone who understands your specific business context.
Security architecture and engineering must align with your business technology roadmap. Integration of security controls into IT infrastructure requires internal expertise.
Business context and risk prioritization depend on asset criticality assessment, risk evaluation specific to your operations, and incident escalation decisions that require business judgment external providers can’t replicate.
Identity and access governance requires internal process ownership for user provisioning workflows integrated with HR systems and privileged access management policy development.
The Financial Case
The numbers make the decision relatively straightforward for most organizations below enterprise scale.
Research establishes a significant cost differential between in-house and outsourced security operations. In-house SOC typically costs millions annually when accounting for staffing, technology, and facilities.
Outsourced SOCaaS often delivers substantial savings compared to building equivalent internal capabilities, with organizations regularly reporting 40-50% cost reductions when moving to managed security services. These savings become even more significant for mid-market environments, where typical SOCaaS investments represent a fraction of what building an equivalent in-house security operations center would cost.
The global average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million, representing a 10% year-over-year increase according to IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report. Organizations with staffing shortages experienced significantly higher breach costs, paying an additional $1.76 million on average. Preventing a single breach can cover multiple years of SOCaaS investment. Industry research indicates nearly half of organizations experienced cyber incidents over the past year, which means cumulative breach risk compounds significantly over a three-year planning horizon.
SOCaaS delivers these advanced capabilities without capital investment in technology platforms or lengthy training programs for internal staff.
Evaluating Providers
Vendor selection matters more than most buyers realize. The difference between good and bad SOCaaS isn’t just features. It’s whether providers actually take containment actions or just send you another alert to handle yourself.
Key Questions to Ask
Beyond asking whether the provider offers remote mitigative response, dig into operational specifics.
What actions can your SOC take without our approval? Get specifics on endpoint isolation, credential revocation, and network segmentation.
What are your SLAs for initial triage and containment actions? Look for rapid detection and automated containment capabilities.
Can we see real-time investigation status and access our security data? Determine whether you have full visibility into ongoing investigations and ownership of your data.
How does your platform integrate with our existing tools? Vendor-agnostic integration matters for long-term flexibility.
When do you escalate to our team, and what information do you provide? Understand the handoff process and what context accompanies escalations.
Document the answers and compare them across vendors. The differences reveal more than any marketing material.
Warning Signs
Watch for these indicators of monitoring-only services dressed as SOCaaS:
- Vague language about “response recommendations” rather than “response actions”
- Heavy emphasis on alerting speed without mention of containment capabilities
- No clear SLAs for automated remediation
- Requirements for customer approval on routine containment actions
- Inability to demonstrate actual threat containment workflows
Any of these should prompt deeper due diligence before signing a contract.
Making the Decision
The question isn’t whether mid-market organizations can afford SOCaaS. It’s whether they can afford to operate without it. Rising breach costs, ransomware hitting nearly every industry, and constant new vulnerabilities demand operational security capabilities.
SOCaaS provides those capabilities without requiring extensive internal staffing, substantial direct labor costs, or the recruitment challenges facing organizations competing for scarce security talent.
For MSPs serving mid-market enterprises, the managed security services market is experiencing double-digit annual growth. SOCaaS becomes both an operational necessity and a revenue opportunity.
For mid-market IT directors, SOCaaS delivers enterprise-grade security operations at significant cost reduction compared to building equivalent internal capabilities.
The financial case strongly favors outsourced security operations for all organizations lacking enterprise scale. Adlumin MDR provides the detection and response capabilities, while Cove Data Protection ensures recovery when prevention fails. Prevention fails sometimes. Detection gets bypassed. Recovery speed determines whether ransomware becomes a manageable incident or a business-ending disaster.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does SOCaaS implementation typically take?
N‑able solutions can have you up and running in 90 minutes or less. That’s a significant difference from typical implementations, where most organizations achieve basic monitoring within days and full integration of response workflows takes two to four weeks. The cloud-native architecture eliminates the infrastructure deployment that slowed legacy implementations.
What happens during the transition from MSSP to SOCaaS?
Most providers support parallel operation during transition. Your existing MSSP continues monitoring while the SOCaaS provider deploys agents, integrates data sources, and tunes detection rules. Once the SOCaaS platform demonstrates coverage parity, you can sunset the MSSP relationship. Plan for 30-60 days of overlap.
How do SOCaaS providers handle false positives?
Quality providers tune their detection models to your environment during onboarding, reducing false positives over the first 30-90 days. AI-powered platforms learn normal behavior patterns and adjust thresholds automatically. Ask prospective providers about their false positive rates and tuning methodology during evaluation.
What contract terms should I negotiate?
Key terms include response time SLAs with financial penalties, data retention and portability rights, termination notice periods, and scope of automated response actions. Avoid contracts that lock you into multi-year terms without performance guarantees or that restrict your access to your own security data.
Can SOCaaS work alongside existing security tools?
Yes. Vendor-agnostic SOCaaS platforms integrate with existing EDR, SIEM, firewall, and identity providers through APIs and log forwarding. This flexibility lets you preserve existing tool investments while adding the response capabilities that monitoring-only tools lack.