Looking Beyond Cost — The True ROI of a SOC and MDR

For many executives, the first instinct is to compare the cost of building a SOC versus outsourcing it to a MDR provider.
But the reality is that cost is only one part of the equation.

The real comparison lies in understanding five strategic dimensions:

1. Financial Investment
2. Access to Expertise
3. Agility and Scalability
4. Operational Resilience
5. Modernisation Velocity

Let’s explore how each shapes long-term outcomes.

1. Financial Investment

Building a SOC — CapEx Heavy, OpEx Intensive

Building an in-house SOC requires:

• SIEM/XDR platform licences (often six figures annually)
• Infrastructure and log storage
• 24×7 analyst staffing (Tier 1–3, engineering, management)
• Continuous training and content tuning

The first-year investment can easily exceed USD $1–2 million, with annual operational costs consuming 40–60% of that figure in staff and maintenance.

Outsourcing — Predictable and Scalable

MDR services follow an OPEX subscription model, typically billed per endpoint or per log source.
This eliminates large upfront investments and converts cybersecurity operations into a predictable monthly expense.

Quote from Loris Minassian (Founder @ CyberStash)
“Building a SOC is a capital project. Outsourcing transforms it into a service.”

Approximate Cost Snapshot (Enterprise-Scale Example):

Component	Build (In-House)	Outsource (MDR)
Initial Setup (SIEM, Infra, HR)	USD $1.2M+	USD $0
Annual Opex (People, Tools, Upgrades)	USD $600K–$900K	USD $180K–$300K
Time to Operational Readiness	6–18 months	4–8 weeks
Long-Term ROI (3 years)	Moderate, if sustained	High, immediate

Note: Figures represent typical mid-size enterprise environments (1,000–3,000 endpoints).

2. Access to Expertise

A modern SOC requires at least five distinct roles to operate effectively:

• Tier 1–3 Analysts
• Threat Intelligence Lead
• Detection Engineer / SIEM Specialist
• Incident Responder / Forensic Analyst
• SOC Manager / Governance Lead

Recruiting and retaining this talent is difficult even for large organisations.
Outsourced MDR providers, however, deliver instant access to global talent pools and shared threat intelligence, allowing you to benefit from collective experience across multiple clients and industries.

Quote from Loris Minassian (Founder @ CyberStash)
“In-house SOCs build institutional knowledge. MDR providers deliver instant depth.”

3. Agility and Scalability

In-House SOC

Scaling your SOC means scaling people, tools, and infrastructure.
Adding 500 endpoints or a new cloud platform often requires additional ingestion licences, rule tuning, and analyst capacity.
It’s a linear growth model — costs rise directly with scope.

MDR / Outsourced SOC

Scaling through MDR is elastic.
Providers expand ingestion pipelines, detection rules, and response coverage seamlessly under pre-agreed pricing tiers.
This is particularly advantageous for organisations with seasonal workloads, mergers, or rapid cloud adoption.

4. Operational Resilience

Building your own SOC means also managing its continuity — covering sick leave, public holidays, night shifts, and turnover.
Analyst burnout is a serious issue in long-running internal SOCs, leading to alert fatigue and inconsistency.

MDR providers mitigate this by using follow-the-sun models, distributed teams, and automation to maintain constant uptime and consistent response quality.

Quote from Loris Minassian (Founder @ CyberStash):
“A resilient SOC is built around response, not noise. Alerts only matter when someone acts on them. Remember — it’s not the 3 a.m. alert that proves your SOC works, it’s the 3 a.m. response.”

5. Modernisation Velocity

Cyber adversaries evolve daily.
The tools, content, and playbooks that worked six months ago are now obsolete.

In-House SOC

Internal SOCs depend on internal R&D and detection engineering to stay current.
Unless dedicated resources are allocated to content tuning and rule development, the SOC risks drifting into irrelevance — reacting to yesterday’s attacks instead of detecting tomorrow’s.

Outsourced MDR

MDR providers continuously modernise detection content, integrate new threat intelligence sources, and evolve their machine-learning models across their global client base.
You benefit from shared intelligence uplift — the insight from one client’s breach strengthens every other client’s defences.

At a Glance: Strengths and Limitations for SOC and MDR

Dimension	Build In-House SOC	Outsource (MDR)
Control & Data Sovereignty	Full control	Requires contractual assurance
Customisation	Deeply tailored	Limited to service scope
Deployment Speed	Slow (months)	Rapid (weeks)
Scalability	Constrained by resources	Elastic
Talent Retention	High risk	Provider-managed
Modernisation Pace	Depends on internal funding	Continuous provider R&D
Cost Predictability	Variable	Fixed monthly/annual pricing
24×7 Resilience	Expensive to sustain	Built-in
Regulatory Fit	Ideal for critical sectors	Must validate compliance
Long-Term ROI	Moderate	High (operational maturity from day one)

Strategic Insight: The Inflection Point

The decision often hinges on scale and maturity:

• Small to mid-size enterprises gain more from outsourcing or co-managed MDR — faster ROI, lower overhead, and immediate resilience.
• Large, regulated organisations often start outsourced, then transition to a hybrid SOC, gradually insourcing over time to regain strategic control.

Quote from Loris Minassian (Founder @ CyberStash):
“You don’t have to build a SOC to own it — you can co-own resilience through the right MDR partnership.”

Modernisation: The Invisible Cost Curve

The most underestimated cost in SOC operations is modernisation — the continuous reengineering of detections, automations, and integrations.
Whether internal or outsourced, the SOC that fails to modernise every 6–12 months becomes functionally obsolete.

Building internally means shouldering this investment directly.
Outsourcing means paying for it as part of your subscription — invisible but essential.

Decision Guidance Summary

Objective	Recommended Approach
Speed to operational capability	Outsource / MDR
Data sovereignty or national compliance	Build or Hybrid
Cost containment	Outsource
Control and custom detection content	Build or Hybrid
24×7 coverage without burnout	Outsource
Rapid scalability	Outsource
Knowledge retention and cultural uplift	Hybrid
Regulatory assurance (Defence, Finance, Gov)	Build or Hybrid

Conclusion

The comparison isn’t binary — it’s strategic.
Building provides sovereignty and cultural depth.
Outsourcing provides agility and resilience.
Hybrid delivers balance and scalability.

The optimal choice depends not on budget alone, but on how your organisation defines control, risk, and value in an era where cyber resilience is the new competitive edge.

Quote from Loris Minassian (Founder @ CyberStash):
“The SOC decision is not about cost; it’s about confidence — the confidence to detect, respond, and recover, no matter when or where a threat emerges.”