SOC as a Service

Analysts are on shift around the clock, so an alert is triaged when it fires rather than when the next working day starts. An event at 02:00 on a Sunday is looked at by a person, not queued until Monday. Confirmed threats are escalated to your named contacts at the time they are confirmed; routine activity is not pushed to you, it is recorded and summarised in the monthly SOC report, with a quarterly review of what to change next. Every case carries a tracked time to detect and time to respond, and those numbers appear in the report rather than being asserted. What around the clock does not mean is a fixed published response time. Targets are agreed with you up front by severity, because what counts as urgent on a payment system is not what counts as urgent on a test box. Coverage also stops where your telemetry stops.

Endpoints, servers, cloud tenants and network devices at minimum, plus whatever else carries evidence of the attacks you care about. During onboarding we connect each source, validate that it parses correctly, and record it in a log source inventory, so there is a written list of what is watched and what is not. That list matters more than it sounds: detection is bounded by telemetry, and a system that sends us nothing stays invisible to us no matter how good the rules are. You supply access to the sources and a technical contact who can approve connections. We handle parsing, baselining and retention, which is set to match your compliance obligations rather than left at a default. Where a source cannot be connected, a legacy application with no usable logging for instance, we say so in the inventory rather than leaving a silent gap in the picture.

It is triaged by an analyst, confirmed or dismissed, and escalated to your named contacts only when it is real. The sequence is fixed. The alert is checked against the severity matrix agreed at onboarding, enriched with asset context and current threat intelligence, then investigated far enough to decide whether it is an attack, a misconfiguration, or normal behaviour nobody told us about. Dismissals are logged rather than silently dropped, and repeat benign activity is suppressed so the same non-event does not wake anyone twice. For a confirmed incident we move to the response playbook agreed with you before go-live: isolate affected hosts, revoke compromised credentials, preserve evidence for later forensic review, and work through containment and recovery alongside your technical team. You receive an incident report with root cause. What you do not receive is a raw alert forwarded to your inbox for you to interpret.

An in-house SOC needs headcount on a 24-hour rota, a platform, and someone senior to tune it. This gives you the operational outcome without that hiring problem. Against a product, the difference is tuning and judgement. Detection content shipped in a box fires on generic behaviour, which is why teams who buy one often end up ignoring the console. We tune detections to your environment, suppress known-good activity that generates repeat noise, write rules for your business-specific applications, and validate each one with simulated attack activity. Alerts are worked by a person before they reach you, so what lands is a confirmed incident with context rather than a notification you have to research. What you still own is the fixing. We isolate hosts, revoke credentials and guide containment, but patching, rebuilding and change approval stay with your IT team, and neither a product nor this service removes that work.

Monitoring goes live once your log sources are connected, parsed correctly and baselined, and the detections have been tuned against your environment. It starts with a 30 to 45 minute scoping call, after which you get a written scope with a timeline and a fixed price, so the duration is committed before anything is connected rather than discovered halfway through. The variable is your side: how many sources are in scope, how quickly access and approvals arrive, and whether anyone can answer what normal looks like for the odd application nobody documented. Baselining needs real traffic, so it cannot be compressed without buying yourself a noisier first month. We do not switch on alerting to your contacts before tuning is done, because an untuned ruleset sends you generic detections you would learn to ignore. Onboarding produces a runbook and a log source inventory, so what is watched is written down.