What Is a Security Operations Centre (SOC)?

SOC analysts monitor security alerts from across your environment, investigate suspicious activity, triage incidents by severity, and coordinate containment and response. They correlate data from firewalls, endpoints, identity systems, and cloud platforms to distinguish genuine threats from false positives. With 43% of UK businesses experiencing a breach or attack (DSIT 2025), having trained analysts reviewing alerts around the clock significantly reduces dwell time.

Building an in-house SOC requires hiring a minimum of five to six analysts for 24/7 coverage, plus SIEM licensing, tooling, and training — typically exceeding £300,000 per year. A managed SOC for a 50-user business costs roughly £1,500 to £5,000 per month, providing equivalent coverage at a fraction of the cost. This makes managed SOC services the practical option for UK SMEs.

A Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platform aggregates logs from across your entire environment — endpoints, firewalls, servers, cloud services — and correlates events to detect patterns indicating an attack. The SIEM is the backbone of SOC operations, enabling analysts to spot threats that no single system would flag in isolation. The average cost of the most disruptive breach is £3,550 (DSIT 2025), and early SIEM-based detection can prevent escalation.