Updated: September 2026. Written while the Medusa ransomware campaign passes 500 victims and exploits new CVEs within 24 hours of disclosure. Most ransomware detonates at night, on weekends or on holidays, exactly when nobody at a small business is watching.
A shared SOC gives your business the same 24×7 security operations center that enterprises run, at a fraction of the price, because you share it. One dedicated SOC floor, wall-to-wall monitoring dashboards, escalation hotlines and a tiered analyst team (L1 triage, L2 investigation, L3 response) watch many companies at once. Each customer gets full coverage; the cost of the floor, the people and the tooling is split across all of them. The result: typically 80 percent cheaper than hiring your own team, with better outcomes, because you inherit hierarchy, experience and round-the-clock coverage that a one-person IT department can never provide.
What is a shared SOC?
Instead of five analysts sitting idle waiting for your one incident, our SOC center monitors alerts across many SMBs from one operations floor: SIEM feeds, EDR consoles, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace signals, firewall and identity logs on live dashboards, with a 24×7 hotline for emergencies. When something fires at 3 am, an L1 analyst triages it within minutes, an L2 investigates, and an L3 responder acts: isolating the endpoint, blocking the account, killing the process, then calling you. You get threat monitoring, threat mitigation, incident response and after-hours support as one service, with follow-the-sun staffing across CET and IST time zones so there is never a dead shift.
Shared SOC vs hiring your own team
| Item | In-house 24×7 team | Shared SOC |
|---|---|---|
| People needed | Minimum 5 analysts to cover shifts, plus a lead | Included: tiered L1, L2, L3 team |
| Typical monthly cost | $45,000 to $70,000 in salaries alone | From a few hundred dollars, based on endpoints and coverage |
| Tooling (SIEM, EDR consoles, dashboards) | You buy and maintain it | Included, partner pricing |
| Experience | Whoever you can hire | Analysts who see incidents across many environments daily |
| Nights, weekends, holidays | Your weakest point | Fully staffed, always |
| Escalation | Depends on one person answering | Documented hierarchy, hotline, defined response times |
That is where the 80 percent figure comes from: even a single competent security hire costs $8,000 to $12,000 a month and sleeps at night. A shared SOC costs a fraction of one salary and never sleeps.
What is included
- 24×7 threat monitoring: SIEM and EDR alerts watched around the clock on a dedicated SOC floor with live dashboards and monitoring channels.
- Threat mitigation: containment actions taken for you: isolate the host, disable the account, block the hash, revoke the session.
- 24×7 incident response: a retainer with defined response times and an emergency hotline, so a 3 am ransomware event gets an expert in minutes, not a voicemail.
- After-hours support: nights, weekends and holidays covered, either as your full SOC or as the extension of your existing IT team.
- Compliance reporting: the monitoring, logging and incident documentation that NIS2 in the EU, CMMC, SOC 2 and HIPAA in the US, and CPCSC in Canada all require, including evidence for 24 and 72 hour incident notification duties.
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