In-House SOC vs Outsourced SOC: The SMB Math

Every growing company eventually asks: should we build security operations ourselves or buy it as a service? For enterprises, it's a genuine debate. For SMBs, the math is short — but it's worth seeing why.

What "in-house SOC" actually requires

24/7 coverage is the unforgiving part. One person cannot watch alerts around the clock; covering nights, weekends, holidays, sick days, and turnover requires a rotation of several trained analysts. Add the tooling — SIEM, detection platforms, threat intelligence — plus the ongoing training to keep skills current against evolving attacks.

Before a single threat is caught, an honest in-house 24/7 operation costs multiple full-time security salaries per year plus tooling. For a company whose entire IT function is one to three people, the conclusion isn't subtle.

What the hybrid trap looks like

Many SMBs land in the middle without deciding to: they buy good tools (an EDR, a firewall) and assign alerts to the existing IT person "on top of everything else." The result is predictable — alerts get checked during business hours, when there's time, which means intrusions that start Friday night run unwatched until Monday. The tools are fine. The coverage is fiction.

What outsourcing actually buys

A managed SOC spreads the cost of the analyst rotation, the tooling, and the expertise across many customers. You're not paying for a team — you're paying for your share of one that already exists and is already awake.

At CyberOM, that share is priced per endpoint:

• SOC & Response — $9.20 / endpoint / month, monitoring through the EDR you already own (BYOE).

• SOC & Extended Response — $15.00 / endpoint / month, with extended response coverage (BYOE).

• Full Cyber Stack — $35.00 / endpoint / month, including Acronis EDR for companies starting from zero.

A 25-endpoint company gets a genuine 24/7 operation for $230–$875 a month — a fraction of one junior analyst's salary, with no recruitment, no rotation planning, and no single point of failure.

When in-house does make sense

Honesty cuts both ways: at sufficient scale — hundreds of endpoints, dedicated security budget, regulatory drivers for direct control — building internal capability (often alongside a managed service) becomes defensible. If that's you, our vCISO service ($300 per client/month, 12-month minimum) can help design that roadmap instead of selling you a package.

FAQ

Do we lose control by outsourcing?

You delegate monitoring and first response, not decisions. Escalation and response actions follow rules agreed with you.

Can our IT person work with your SOC?

That's the ideal setup — your IT handles the environment, our SOC handles detection and response, with clear handoffs.

How fast can we start?

Submit a request online; we respond within 24 hours and schedule installation from there.

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