What is a SOC (Security Operations Centre)?

A SOC (Security Operations Centre) is a team — often staffed around the clock — that monitors an organisation’s systems for security threats and responds when something is detected. It is the capability you are really buying when you engage a managed security service provider (MSSP):

• Built for an internal estate — office networks, servers, fleets of managed laptops, and the staff and budget to act on a 2am alert.
• A real need at scale — that is a genuine need for medium and large businesses, and for some regulated ones it is mandatory.
• Not the small-business shape — for a typical 1 to 30-staff business running a website, cloud email and a few laptops, there is usually no internal network for a SOC to watch — the public-facing surface is the story, which is the job of a scanning service rather than a 24/7 operations centre.

A SOC is the right answer when you have an internal network and the staff to respond to its alerts; most small businesses have neither, so paying for one solves a problem they do not have.