Should Small Businesses Build an In-House SOC? The Real Cost of 24/7 Security

It’s 10:47 PM. Your finance lead just forwarded a suspicious invoice with new bank details. Your stomach drops. What if someone has been watching our inboxes for weeks? This is the moment most small business leaders first Google “24/7 cybersecurity monitoring” and discover the term Security Operations Center (SOC). 

A Security Operations Center (SOC) is a dedicated team that monitors your systems 24/7, investigates suspicious activity, and responds to cyber incidents. While large enterprises build internal SOCs with multiple security analysts working in shifts, most small and mid-sized businesses (10-200 employees) get better protection from strong security fundamentals plus AI-driven or managed virtual SOC platforms—without the six-figure cost of hiring a full security department. 

This guide breaks down the real economics of building an in-house SOC, reveals the hidden traps that catch ambitious founders, and shows you what actually works for SME-scale 24/7 cybersecurity protection.  

What Does “Building a SOC” Actually Mean for Small Businesses? 

When you say “we’ll build an in-house SOC,” you’re committing to three fundamental requirements that most SME leaders drastically underestimate: 

1. True 24/7 Coverage Requires Multiple People 

Not “on-call availability.” Literal around-the-clock monitoring: 

• Night shifts covering 11 PM – 7 AM when most ransomware attacks deploy 
• Weekend coverage when your office is closed but attackers are most active 
• Holiday rotations including Christmas, New Year’s, and local public holidays 
• Vacation backup ensuring no single point of failure when someone travels 

One security analyst cannot provide 24/7 cybersecurity monitoring. Real coverage requires at minimum 2-3 full-time security analysts to handle shift rotations, sick days, and vacation coverage. 

2. Signal-to-Noise Expertise 

Security tools generate thousands of alerts daily. A functioning SOC means someone is constantly making high-stakes decisions: 

• Is this alert normal behavior? (Employee accessing files from new location) 
• Is this suspicious but safe? (Unusual login time but legitimate user) 
• Is this the incident that destroys our quarter? (Credential harvesting attempt from known threat actor IP) 

According to SANS Institute research, 67% of security alerts are false positives. Your SOC analyst’s job is separating the 33% that matter—within minutes, not days. 

3. Rehearsed Incident Response Playbooks 

When a real breach hits, improvising in a Slack thread is how companies lose millions. You need pre-documented answers to: 

• Who has authority to isolate infected devices or shut down servers? 
• Who communicates with affected customers—and what exactly do you say? 
• Who makes the call on whether to involve law enforcement or regulators? 
• What’s the legal threshold for notifying customers about a data exposure? 

These aren’t abstract questions. Without clear roles and practiced procedures, your “SOC” is just expensive dashboard software and false confidence. 

The Uncomfortable Math: What an In-House SOC Really Costs 

Many SME leaders start with a lean mindset: “We’ll just hire one security person first.” The math doesn’t work. Here’s why: 

Minimum Viable Team Structure 

To run anything resembling 24/7 cyber security protection, you realistically need: 

For context, that’s the same budget that could fund: 

• A complete product development squad for 12 months 
• An entire sales team opening a new market 
• 18+ months of additional runway for a Series A startup 

You’re not “spending on security.” You’re choosing to become a mini security company inside your actual business. 

Why Smart Founders Get Emotionally Trapped 

If you’re a high-ownership CEO or founder, building your own 24/7 security team feels right: 

• “We’re serious now—we should have our own people” 
• “I want direct control, not vendor dependence” 
• “Real companies have internal SOCs, don’t they?” 

These instincts are healthy in product development and hiring. But in cybersecurity, they become a strategic trap because you’re deciding: 

“We, a 50-person company, are going to compete with full-time cybersecurity vendors on their own battlefield.” 

It’s equivalent to: 

• Building your own data center instead of using AWS because “cloud is a dependency” 
• Writing a custom database engine instead of PostgreSQL because “we want control” 
• Maintaining your own email server instead of Google Workspace 

You can do these things. The question is: Is this the highest-leverage use of your limited capital and attention? 

For most SMEs, the honest answer is no.  

Hidden Risks Nobody Includes in the SOC Business Case 

1. The “Security Hero” Single Point of Failure 

Most SMEs that attempt internal SOCs end up with one overworked security person who becomes the knowledge monopoly: 

• All tool configurations live in their head 
• All incident history and institutional memory stays with them 
• All custom detection rules and integration scripts disappear when they leave 

When they burn out or accept a better offer (and in today’s market, they will), your “SOC” evaporates in 90 days. You’re back to square one—except now you’ve lost a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

2. False Confidence Across the Organization 

The moment internal teams hear “we have a SOC” or “we hired a security guy,” behavior quietly changes in dangerous ways: 

• Engineers ship features faster with fewer security checks (“security will catch it”) 
• Finance teams relax their verification procedures (“we’re protected now”) 
• Leadership stops asking hard questions about risk 

If the reality is one exhausted analyst drowning in alert noise, your actual risk may increase after “getting serious about security”—because everyone’s guard is down. 

3. Focus Drift for Your Best Technical People 

Your strongest engineers gradually get pulled into: 

• Building custom log aggregation pipelines 
• Tuning SIEM detection rules and dashboards 
• Writing compliance reports for audits 

Day by day, they’re doing less of what grows revenue and more to keep a fragile SOC infrastructure barely functioning. This is the hidden opportunity cost that never shows up in the SOC budget spreadsheet.  

Who Should Actually Build an In-House SOC? 

There are legitimate cases where building internal security operations makes sense: 

✅ You Should Build an In-House SOC If: 

• You ARE a security company – Security is your product; internal capability is strategic differentiation 
• You’re in heavily regulated critical infrastructure – Banking, defense, healthcare with strict in-house mandates 
• You’re 500+ employees with complex, global operations – Mature organization with dedicated security budget and long-term need for internal control 

❌ You Should NOT Build an In-House SOC If: 

• You’re 10-200 employees (classic SME range) 
• You’re pre-Series B with runway concerns 
• Security isn’t your core product or differentiator 
• You need immediate protection and can’t wait 12-18 months to build capability 

Building a SOC at small scale is like buying your own fire truck because you care about office safety. Sprinklers, alarms, and trained staff protect you far more effectively—for 10% of the cost. 

What Small Businesses Actually Need Instead 

Here’s the contrarian but honest recommendation from a security vendor: 

If you’re a 10-200 person company, you should not build an in-house SOC—even though we sell security technology. 

We’d rather tell you this clearly than watch you burn headcount and capital on the wrong model. What you actually need: 

The Right-Sized Security Model for SMEs 

This combination gives you enterprise-grade 24/7 cybersecurity monitoring for 10-15% of what an in-house SOC costs. 

People Also Ask: In-House SOC for Small Business 

How much does it cost to build a SOC? 

A functional in-house SOC requires 2-3 security analysts plus tooling, totaling $335,000-$540,000 annually for small businesses. Most SMEs get equivalent 24/7 protection from AI-driven virtual SOC platforms at $12,000-$50,000/year—a 90% cost reduction. 

What is the difference between SOC and virtual SOC? 

A traditional SOC employs full-time analysts monitoring security tools 24/7. A virtual SOC uses AI automation and remote security experts to provide the same continuous monitoring and incident response—without the overhead of hiring, training, and managing an internal security team. 

Can a small business have a SOC? 

Yes, but not the traditional in-house model. Small businesses (10-200 employees) typically use virtual SOC services or managed detection and response (MDR) platforms that provide 24/7 monitoring through automation and external security operations teams—at a fraction of the cost. 

What are the risks of not having 24/7 monitoring? 

Without continuous monitoring, cyberattacks progress undetected for an average of 287 days (IBM Cost of Data Breach Report). Attackers operate during off-hours when no one is watching. Modern threats move fast—ransomware can encrypt entire networks in under 4 hours, making 24/7 detection critical. 

When You Can Revisit Building an Internal SOC 

If you eventually grow into a 500+ person, multi-regional organization with significant compliance obligations, you can reconsider in-house security operations from a completely different position: 

• Larger security budget that doesn’t sacrifice product development 
• More complex risk profile that justifies specialist investment 
• Regulatory requirements that specifically mandate certain in-house controls 
• Mature security program with proven processes and tooling 

At that stage, you’re not “experimenting with a SOC.” You’re scaling proven capability to match organizational maturity. 

Conclusion 

Your job as a founder isn’t to build the most impressive security infrastructure. It’s to: 

• Buy the right level of protection for your actual size and risk 
• Ensure someone or something is genuinely watching 24/7 
• Keep your people and customers safe—without turning your company into a security science experiment 

Most small businesses need solid security hygiene, AI-driven 24/7 monitoring, and one clear internal owner—not a $500K internal SOC that drains resources from core business growth. 

Platforms like ShieldNet Defense exist specifically for this gap: providing SMEs with continuous security monitoring through automation and virtual SOC capabilities, letting you maintain a lean focused team instead of building a security department. 

Ready to explore right-sized 24/7 protection?