THREAT‑WATCH
MDR VS IN-HOUSE SOC
Managed Detection & Response vs. Building Your Own SOC
Both are legitimate paths to 24/7 security coverage. Here's the honest structural comparison, not a sales pitch.
The 24/7 coverage math
True round-the-clock coverage isn't three shifts and three people. Accounting for weekends, holidays, sick leave, and the fact that no one works 365 days a year, a genuinely resilient in-house SOC needs a meaningfully larger team than a naive shift count suggests, before a single alert has been investigated. An MDR provider spreads that same staffing cost across many clients, which is structurally why it's cheaper per client than building it alone.
The hiring and retention problem
This isn't specific to any one company; it's an industry-wide labor market reality. ISC2's 2024 Cybersecurity Workforce Study estimated a global shortage of over 4.7 million cybersecurity professionals. In ISC2's 2025 follow-up study, 33% of organizations said they don't have the resources to adequately staff their security teams, and 88% reported at least one significant security event tied to a skills shortage in the past year. Building a SOC means competing in that same hiring market, then retaining people against constant recruiter outreach.
The tooling problem
An in-house SOC needs its own SIEM, EDR, threat intelligence feeds, and case management system, each separately procured, licensed, integrated, and kept current. Getting these tools to actually work together, rather than just running in parallel, is itself a significant engineering effort most organizations underestimate. An MDR relationship replaces that entire stack with one vendor relationship and one bill.
The cost of getting it wrong
IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report puts the global average total cost of a breach at $4.44M, and found organizations with extensive security AI and automation save $1.9M per breach compared to those without. The global average time to identify and contain a breach is still 241 days, largely a function of how mature an organization's detection capability actually is, not just whether one exists on paper. See the full sourced breakdown on our Breach Cost Calculator.
See the Breach Cost CalculatorWhen in-house genuinely makes sense
Large enterprises with dedicated security budgets, an existing mature security program, and the ability to compete for scarce talent can build and sustain an effective in-house SOC. For most mid-market organizations, the staffing, hiring, and tooling costs above are exactly why MDR exists: it's the practical way to get 24/7 coverage without needing to solve the industry-wide talent shortage yourself.
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