Should you outsource your SOC? What an outsourced SOC brings

For most SMEs, mid-sized firms and MSPs, yes. An outsourced SOC gives you 24/7 monitoring, experienced analysts and incident response capability without having to hire, train and roster a team day and night. An in-house SOC mainly makes sense for large organisations with strict constraints and the resources to sustain it.

This article is part of our series on choosing a managed SOC. Once you have decided, see How do you choose a SOC provider?.

What an in-house SOC takes

A SOC is not a piece of software: it is a team, tools and procedures. Building one in-house means:

• Analysts available at all times. A week has 168 hours. EU rules cap average working time at 48 hours a week (Working Time Directive, Article 6), so a single analyst seat staffed around the clock needs at least four people, before holidays, training and sick leave. In practice, with normal working weeks, it takes more.
• Scarce skills: alert triage, investigation, incident response, up-to-date threat knowledge.
• Tooling: EDR, log collection and correlation, case management, threat intelligence.
• Procedures: escalation, on-call, crisis communication, continuous improvement of detection rules.

For most organisations, that is a heavy, long-term undertaking, and the hardest part is hiring and keeping the right people.

What an outsourced SOC brings

• Immediate 24/7 coverage from a team that already exists.
• Shared visibility: the provider sees attacks across many clients and turns them into detection rules for everyone.
• Incident response capability, if included, ready to go without searching for a provider mid-crisis.
• More predictable costs than an in-house team, with price driven by the scope monitored and the services included.
• A fast start, especially when the provider integrates natively with your tools.

See also What is SOC as a Service? and What is included in a managed SOC?.

In-house, outsourced or hybrid

Criterion	In-house SOC	Outsourced SOC	Hybrid model
24/7 coverage	Hard to sustain	Included	Shared
Time to set up	Long (hiring, tooling)	Short	Medium
Business context knowledge	Very strong	Built with the client	Strong
Dependence on hiring	High	Low	Medium
Threat visibility	Limited to one organisation	Shared across many clients	Shared
Best suited to	Large organisations	SMEs, mid-sized firms, MSPs	Organisations with an existing security team

For a detailed comparison from an MSP’s point of view, see Managed SOC vs in-house SOC for MSPs.

When to keep a SOC in-house

An in-house SOC, or at least a strong internal security team, still makes sense when:

• the organisation is large and already has a security team;
• regulatory or confidentiality constraints mean certain data cannot leave the organisation;
• the business context is highly specific (industrial systems, isolated environments).

Even then, hybrid models are common: the internal team keeps control of context and decisions, while the outsourced SOC covers nights, weekends or first-line triage.

What you cannot outsource

Outsourcing monitoring does not outsource accountability. These stay with the client (or its MSP):

• governance: NIS2 makes management responsible for approving cybersecurity risk measures (Article 20);
• decisions during an incident: shutting down a service, communication, regulatory reporting;
• remediation on the IT estate: patches, permissions, configuration;
• provider oversight: reading reports and reviewing service commitments.

See Managed SOC and MSP: who does what?.

The MSP case

For an MSP, the question is different: build its own SOC for all clients, or rely on a partner SOC. A partnership lets the MSP offer 24/7 detection and response without carrying the cost of hiring a dedicated team, while keeping the client relationship.

That is Cyna’s model: a 24/7 managed SOC run from France by in-house teams, with a CERT, offered through partner MSPs who own the relationship with their clients (contract, invoicing, white-label reporting). The terms (scope, licences) are set out in the contract agreed with the partner MSP, and Cyna’s incident response on-call team is available 24/7 from the Report an incident page.

Talk to an expert

Weighing an in-house SOC against an outsourced SOC? If you work with a Cyna partner MSP, they are your first point of contact. Otherwise, get in touch.

Frequently asked questions

Can we outsource just nights and weekends?

Some hybrid models allow it: the in-house team covers the working day and the outsourced SOC covers nights and weekends. Handover procedures then need to be very clear.

Does an outsourced SOC see all our data?

It sees the logs and telemetry needed for detection, not all your files. Check in the contract which data is collected, where it is stored, how long it is kept and who can access it.

Does outsourcing the SOC help with NIS2?

Yes, for incident handling and fast reporting. But the entity remains responsible for its compliance. See Does a managed SOC help with NIS2?.

How long does it take to move to an outsourced SOC?

It depends on scope and existing tools. With ready-made integrations, technical onboarding can be quick; alert tuning then takes several weeks.