SOCaaS Pros and Cons: Decide What’s Best for Your Organization

Your security team is stretched thin. Tickets keep piling up. And the board wants 24/7 threat monitoring by next quarter. Building an in-house SOC sounds like the answer, but the math rarely works in your favor.

SOC as a Service gives you enterprise-grade security operations without the million-dollar-plus investment. For MSPs managing dozens of client environments and mid-market companies operating on lean IT budgets, SOCaaS often represents the only realistic path to continuous monitoring. It’s not a perfect fit for everyone, though. Vendor lock-in, customization limits, and multi-tenant infrastructure concerns deserve serious consideration before you sign.

This article breaks down the real trade-offs between SOCaaS and in-house SOC operations. You’ll get concrete cost comparisons, decision frameworks based on organizational size and maturity, and clear guidance on when hybrid models make the most sense.

SOCaaS Pros

SOC as a Service flips security economics. Stop buying infrastructure. Start subscribing to protection.

Adopting new security tools, hiring and retaining staff, and investing time to identify and manage incidents makes SOCaaS an economical option for organizations looking to reduce their risk of cyber-attacks. When you’re managing 50-200 client environments, SOCaaS gives you these core capabilities:

• 24/7 monitoring with no staffing headaches
• Threat detection and incident response capabilities
• Compliance reporting with audit-ready logs
• One subscription instead of retention battles
• No technology refresh cycles

The market has validated this approach. The majority of top-tier MSSPs now include SOC-as-a-service in their portfolios, making this mainstream service delivery rather than emerging technology.

Expert SOC Analysts Without Recruitment Costs

The talent shortage has fundamentally changed how organizations approach security staffing. Organizations cite as their top challenges that budget is too low (45%) and hiring/retention challenges have worsened. (45%)

SOCaaS provides immediate access to experienced security professionals without recruitment concerns, continuous training investment, or knowledge loss during staff turnover.

Successful MDR vendors like N‑able Adlumin Managed Detection and Response focus on high-fidelity threat detection. They investigate. They stop threats. They report in language that aligns with business risks. MDR is fundamentally a human-led service that engages daily with individual customer data and has skills and expertise in threat monitoring.

Adlumin MDR pairs expert SOC analysts with automated threat response, analyzing 461 billion security events monthly across 25,000+ MSP environments.

24/7/365 Coverage Without Staffing Battles

Round-the-clock coverage is where the economics of in-house SOC operations break down most dramatically. Many organizations lack 24/7 security coverage due to staffing shortages, and the math explains why.

A single analyst earning $96,618 becomes a $483,000+ annual commitment when you staff for true 24/7 coverage with 4 or 5 people. SOCaaS providers solve this by operating follow-the-sun models with shared analyst pools across multiple clients, delivering continuous monitoring without requiring each organization to build its own overnight team.

Rapid Time-to-Value

Speed to operational capability separates SOCaaS from in-house builds. Building an in-house SOC could take as long as 12-24 months for full operational capability, while SOCaaS implementations achieve operational status in less time. For organizations facing immediate compliance deadlines or active threats, that timeline difference can determine whether security gaps get closed in time.

SOCaaS Cons

SOCaaS isn’t without trade-offs. Before signing a contract, evaluate these common concerns that can affect service quality, cost predictability, and long-term flexibility.

Multi-Tenant Infrastructure Concerns

Shared infrastructure creates potential performance and security risks. High-volume clients generating excessive alerts can degrade service quality through the „noisy neighbor“ effect, creating performance issues for other tenants sharing the same analyst pool. Multi-tenant SIEM architectures also create security isolation risks between client environments. Organizations with strict data segregation requirements should evaluate how their provider handles tenant isolation before signing.

Vendor Lock-In and Exit Complexity

Switching SOCaaS providers is harder than switching most SaaS tools. Custom correlation rules, threat intelligence feeds, and detection signatures remain non-portable between SOCaaS platforms. SIEM data exports are expensive, and deep technical connections between SOCaaS platforms and enterprise security tools create switching friction. Security teams also require retraining when switching vendors. Factor these transition costs into any long-term vendor comparison.

Customization Trade-offs

Standardization enables SOCaaS economics, but limits flexibility. SOCaaS threat detection rules may fail to identify industry-specific attack patterns. If you’ve built custom incident response playbooks, SOCaaS standardization might not fit. SOCaaS platforms typically offer limited tools for customizing detection thresholds and correlation rules to match specific organizational infrastructure. Organizations with unique security requirements should assess customization options before committing.

Cost Predictability

Usage-based pricing can create budget surprises. SOCaaS costs often scale with log volume, creating unpredictable expenses as enterprise environments grow or during security incidents generating high alert volumes. Exceeding contracted alert investigation hours or analyst escalations can trigger additional charges. For MSPs operating on fixed client contracts, model your expected log volumes and alert rates before committing to usage-based pricing structures.

In-House SOC Advantages: Strategic Control and Alignment

For organizations with sufficient resources, in-house SOCs offer benefits that outsourced models cannot replicate. According to Forrester Principal Analyst Jeff Pollard, the number one mistake organizations make when using an MSSP is thinking that managed security services is outsourcing. Security strategy requires retained organizational control regardless of operational service models.

In-house SOC teams provide the assurance that comes with staffing by employees who are familiar with the organization’s infrastructure and understand its security posture. For enterprise MSPs managing client security architectures and mid-market companies with complex compliance obligations, maintaining strategic control prevents security from becoming a black box operation.

In-house teams develop detection rules, response playbooks, and escalation procedures aligned with specific business workflows rather than generic industry templates. They connect security monitoring with business-critical applications, understand legitimate administrative behavior patterns, and contextualize alerts within operational priorities that external analysts cannot fully replicate.

Executive Visibility and Risk Communication

Internal teams excel at translating security data into business context. Modern in-house SOCs provide visibility particularly valuable for non-technical leadership, helping them understand the nature of threats facing their organization and how security staff is responding. This institutional knowledge enables security teams to contextualize threat information for business-specific risks in ways external providers cannot.

For boards and executive teams evaluating security posture and incident response effectiveness, this customized perspective represents a key advantage over standardized vendor reporting.

In-House SOC Reality: The Cost Problem

The benefits of in-house SOCs come with substantial costs that put them out of reach for most organizations.

Prohibitive Labor Costs

Staffing represents the largest expense in SOC operations by a wide margin. Industry research consistently shows that direct labor costs for a fully staffed security operations center typically exceed $1.5M annually, consuming the majority of total SOC budgets.

When combined with infrastructure and technology requirements, total operational costs climb even higher. A typical in-house SOC budget breaks down to:

• Direct analyst and management salaries: $1.2M-$1.8M annually
• SIEM platforms and security tools: $100K-$300K annually
• Infrastructure and overhead: $100K-$200K annually
• Continuous training and certifications: $40K-$80K annually

These figures represent minimum viable operations. Organizations seeking advanced threat hunting, 24/7 coverage, and specialized incident response should expect costs to increase substantially beyond these baseline numbers.

Continuous Technology Investment

Security technology spending continues to outpace overall IT budget growth year over year, and in-house SOCs must keep pace. Building an in-house SOC means continuously adding new tools: SIEM platforms, EDR tools, threat intelligence feeds, SOAR automation, network traffic analysis, vulnerability management, and forensic investigation toolsets. Each addition requires integration effort, training, and ongoing maintenance.

Operational Complexity

Complexity compounds the staffing challenge. Most SOCs operate as highly complex environments with multiple overlapping tools and processes. Entry-level SOC analysts usually don’t stay in their positions very long, creating continuous recruiting, hiring, and training costs that further strain already-stretched budgets.

Where SOCaaS Makes Strategic Sense

SOCaaS makes sense when organizational constraints make in-house SOC operations impractical or uneconomical.

Growth MSPs Serving SMBs (11-250 Employees)

MSPs face unique challenges that make SOCaaS particularly attractive. The reality for most MSPs is that building out a SOC to deliver scalable MDR services is not practical.

The constraints are straightforward: you can’t economically staff 24/7 analyst coverage across diverse client bases, you require multi-tenant monitoring platform architecture to serve multiple clients efficiently, and client retention increasingly depends on demonstrating continuous monitoring capability. SOCaaS addresses all three constraints simultaneously.

Mid-Market Enterprises with Internal IT Departments (250-2,500 employees)

Budget constraints force difficult trade-offs for mid-market security teams. Organizations with annual security budgets cannot viably allocate sufficient resources for in-house SOCs while maintaining other critical security functions like endpoint protection, vulnerability management, and security awareness training. SOCaaS frees the budget for these complementary security investments while still delivering enterprise-grade monitoring.

If You Need Compliance Deadlines Within 90 Days

Compressed timelines eliminate the in-house option entirely. Got a compliance audit in 90 days? You don’t have time to build a SOC. Regulatory requirements for 24/7 continuous monitoring (CMMC Level 2+, NIST 800-171 v3) combined with automated audit-ready logging needs make SOCaaS a viable path to compliance within compressed timeframes.

When In-House SOC Investments Pay Off

In-house SOC investment may make sense when organizations reach sufficient scale for dedicated security operations staff, have budget allocation specifically for 24/7 monitoring, face regulatory requirements mandating complete data control with no third-party access, and have mature incident response workflows already in place.

The decision depends on meeting multiple criteria, not just one. Most organizations find that even stringent compliance frameworks like CMMC, NIST 800-171, or HIPAA do not inherently require in-house capabilities.

Hybrid SOC Models: The Majority Approach

Pure in-house or pure outsourcing rarely represents the optimal choice. Industry research shows high satisfaction rates when organizations combine internal strategic control with external operational support.

Successful hybrid approaches divide responsibilities strategically:

• Internal teams maintain asset management, policy development, and tier-1 monitoring during business hours
• External MDR providers like Adlumin MDR handle threat hunting, 24/7/365 coverage, and specialized incident response capabilities
• Organizations pair N‑able N‑central® for endpoint management and vulnerability detection with Adlumin MDR for continuous monitoring and automated threat response, plus Cove Data Protection™ for immutable backup, covering the complete attack lifecycle from prevention through recovery

This model enables mid-market organizations to retain strategic control while accessing expertise that would cost $2.7M+ annually in direct labor costs alone to build equivalent capabilities in-house.

Making the Decision between in-house SOC and SOCaaS

Evaluating SOCaaS versus building in-house requires objective benchmarks. Use these metrics to guide your decision.

Detection and Response Speed

Response time directly impacts breach costs. Organizations with extensive security automation achieve substantially faster incident detection and containment than those relying on manual processes. Best-in-class SOCaaS demonstrates mean time to detect of less than 11 minutes, a benchmark most in-house SOCs struggle to match without substantial investment.

Coverage Gaps

Staffing limitations create the most common security gaps. With two-thirds of organizations unable to maintain round-the-clock monitoring due to workforce constraints, continuous coverage represents the primary operational improvement SOCaaS delivers.

Total Cost of Ownership

Cost structures heavily favor SOCaaS for most organizations:

• In-house basic SOC capabilities: $1.5M-$2.5M annually
• In-house full capabilities: $2.5M-$5M annually
• SOCaaS enterprise-grade operations: $120K-$360K annually

For most mid-market companies, the cost differential makes the decision straightforward. Growth MSPs and enterprises below $500K annual security budgets will find SOCaaS the only economically viable path to enterprise-grade operations. Organizations approaching enterprise scale with resources to invest in foundational capabilities should consider hybrid models that combine strategic internal expertise with specialized external services.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does SOCaaS really cost compared to building your own SOC?

SOCaaS typically costs $120K-$360K annually. In-house SOC labor alone starts at $1.5M before adding technology, infrastructure, and overhead costs that can push total investment above $2.5M annually.

How quickly can you get SOCaaS running versus building a SOC?

SOCaaS implementations achieve operational status in 4-8 weeks. In-house SOC builds typically require 12-24 months to reach full operational maturity, including hiring, training, tool deployment, and process development.

Can SOCaaS meet compliance requirements for regulated industries?

Yes. Federal agencies use CISA-compliant SOCaaS services. Most compliance frameworks accept third-party SOC services with proper documentation. SOCaaS providers typically offer audit-ready logs, threat summaries, and regular reporting to meet PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance standards.

What are the real risks of using SOCaaS instead of building in-house?

The primary risks include multi-tenant infrastructure vulnerabilities where performance degradation during high-alert periods can affect multiple clients, vendor lock-in through proprietary detection logic and expensive data extraction, and customization limitations for industry-specific attack patterns. Evaluate whether standardized threat detection rules adequately address your specific risk profile before committing.

When should an organization choose hybrid SOC models instead of pure SOCaaS or in-house?

Hybrid models make sense for organizations requiring strategic control over security operations while lacking resources for continuous 24/7 staffing. Internal teams handle tier-1 monitoring during business hours and maintain policy control, while external providers like N‑able Adlumin MDR handle threat hunting, after-hours coverage, and specialized incident response.