What is SOC as a service (SOCaaS)?

It is a SOC that a provider delivers as a service: it supplies analysts, processes and often technology to monitor your environment and respond to incidents. You pay a fee instead of building and maintaining the team. Scope varies widely between providers, so check what the response includes.

Is an outsourced SOC the same as MDR?

In practice they overlap. MDR focuses on detection and response, usually with the ability to contain the threat; some outsourced SOC services are limited to monitoring and alerting. Compare what each one does when it detects something, beyond the name.

Does outsourcing the SOC mean losing control?

It depends on how you contract it. You can define which actions the provider carries out on its own, which ones need your approval and what information you receive about each case. With a complete action log and access to the platform, you keep oversight.

How much does an in-house SOC cost compared with an outsourced one?

It depends on the size of the environment, the sources and the service level, so be wary of generic figures. To compare, add up for the in-house option the salaries for every shift, licenses, infrastructure, training and the cost of replacing people who leave, and set that against the fee for a service with the same scope.

Can I start by outsourcing and build an in-house SOC later?

Yes. Starting with a service gives you coverage while you mature your processes and team. Make sure the contract lets you keep the detections, reports and case history if you decide to bring it in-house.

In-house vs outsourced SOC: comparison and how to choose

What is the difference between an in-house and an outsourced SOC?

With an in-house SOC, your company hires the analysts, buys and maintains the tools and writes the procedures. With an outsourced SOC, a provider brings the team and the processes and works on your environment. In between sits the hybrid model, in which your team keeps part of the operation.

The commercial names get mixed up: SOC as a service (SOCaaS), managed SOC and MDR (managed detection and response) are often used as synonyms. Look at what each service includes: whether it only alerts you or also contains the threat, which sources it covers and who makes each decision.

In-house vs outsourced SOC: comparison

Comparison by criterion. Prices are not included because they depend on the scope of each case.
Criterion	In-house SOC	Outsourced SOC (SOCaaS / MDR)	Hybrid
Cost structure	Salaries, training, licenses, infrastructure and maintenance. High fixed cost even when there are few incidents.	Service fee, usually tied to the number of endpoints, users or sources. More predictable.	A smaller in-house team plus the service fee.
24/7 coverage	Requires rotating shifts: about five people for every seat you want staffed at all times.	Included if the contract specifies it. Check that response, not just monitoring, is 24/7.	The provider covers nights, weekends and peaks; your team covers business hours.
Talent	You have to hire, train and retain analysts in a market with few available profiles.	The provider takes care of hiring and training.	You need fewer in-house profiles, but more specialized ones.
Time to launch	Long: hiring, deploying tools, writing use cases and procedures before you can detect reliably.	Shorter: the processes already exist and the timeline depends mostly on onboarding your sources.	Depends on which part each team takes on.
Control and context	Maximum. The team knows your systems, your users and your business priorities.	Depends on the contract and the information you share. The provider needs time to learn your environment.	Business context stays inside; continuous operations are handled outside.
Threat visibility	Limited to what you see in your own organization.	The provider sees campaigns across many clients and can apply what it learns to all of them.	Combines both views.
Data	You control it, although if you use cloud tools (SaaS EDR or SIEM) it is also processed outside.	The provider accesses your telemetry. Ask where it is processed and who sees it.	Depends on which sources you share.

Why is 24/7 coverage the critical point?

Attackers pick the moment when nobody is watching. According to Sophos's 2026 Active Adversary Report, based on 661 incident response and MDR cases, 88% of ransomware was deployed outside the victim's business hours, and 79% of data exfiltration actions also took place after hours.

A SOC that works 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday to Friday, leaves 123 of the week's 168 hours unmonitored. Covering them with your own staff comes down to simple arithmetic: a year has 8,760 hours, and a full-time employee (40 hours a week) works about 1,800 a year once vacation and public holidays are subtracted. Keeping a single seat staffed day and night takes about five people, before counting sick leave, training and turnover. And a night shift with a single analyst is a single point of failure.

When does an in-house SOC make sense?

You have a volume of assets and risk that justifies a dedicated team, and the budget to sustain it for several years.
You can hire and retain Tier 2 and Tier 3 profiles, not just Tier 1 analysts.
Your systems are highly specific (industrial environments, custom-built software) and context matters more than scale.
Some data cannot leave your infrastructure, because of internal policy or contracts with your customers. Check with your legal counsel which obligations may apply to you.

When does it make sense to outsource the SOC?

You have no security team, or it is one or two people who also handle other tasks.
You need 24/7 coverage now and cannot wait to hire and train a team.
You already have tools (EDR, firewall, email, identity) but nobody monitors them continuously.
You want to turn an uncertain fixed cost into a predictable fee.

How does a hybrid SOC work?

It suits mid-sized and large companies that already have some in-house team. A typical split: the provider monitors, triages and carries out initial containment 24/7; your team keeps the architecture, the relationship with the business, remediation decisions and threat hunting on its own systems.

It works if responsibilities are written down: who can isolate a production server at 3 a.m., who gets called and in what order, and which actions the provider carries out without waiting for confirmation.

What should you ask before hiring an outsourced SOC or MDR provider?

What does the response include? Do you only notify, or do you also isolate machines, disable accounts and block indicators?
How is the SLA measured? From the alert to notification, to the start of the investigation or to containment?
Do you work on my current tools, or do I have to switch EDR or SIEM?
Which sources do you cover: endpoint, network, email, identity, cloud?
Where is my data processed, who has access to it and what happens to it when the contract ends?
Do you use AI? Is it your own or a third party's? Does my telemetry go out to other companies' services?
What is logged for each action, and how can I audit it?

How Ciberia helps

Ciberia MDR works on the telemetry you already have: endpoint, network, email, identity and cloud. It integrates with more than 600 sources and does not replace your EDR or your SIEM, so it builds on what you have already deployed. Proprietary AI agents, built on our own architecture, investigate every alert in seconds and automate about 90% of triage. An analyst validates decisions with impact, 24/7, and every automatic action is logged. The managed service is included, data is processed on servers located in Spain, and the contractual SLA is 15 minutes from critical alert to initial containment.

In-house vs outsourced SOC: which is right for your company?