A managed SOC (Security Operations Centre) provides 24/7 threat detection, investigation, and response delivered by a dedicated team of security analysts. Precursor Security operates a CREST-accredited, UK-based managed SOC from £900/month, monitoring endpoints, networks, cloud environments, and identity platforms with human-led triage on every alert.
Managed SOC.
Your network never stops being watched.
Precursor Security operates a CREST-accredited outsourced security operations centre from a physical facility in Newcastle, providing 24/7 SOC monitoring of your environment, every day of the year. When a critical alert fires, a human analyst begins triage immediately, not a ticket queue or an automated email. Fully managed SOC from as low as £900/month.
What is a
Managed SOC?
Outsourced 24/7 security operations: UK-based human analysts watching your SIEM, endpoint, and cloud telemetry on rotating shifts from a physical facility in Newcastle.
A managed SOC (also outsourced SOC or SOC as a Service) is a contracted 24/7 security operations centre. Human analysts monitor your environment in shifts, correlate signals across SIEM, EDR and identity telemetry, investigate alerts, and trigger containment when a real threat is confirmed.
The six service pillars
Methodology is aligned to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover), MITRE ATT&CK for detection engineering, and the SOC-CMM maturity model. Required by NIS2 Art 21(2)(b), DORA Art 17, ISO 27001:2022 A.8.15 (logging) and A.8.16 (monitoring activities), and increasingly mandated by UK cyber insurance renewals. New to this? Our guide to what a managed SOC is explains the essentials.
Our SOC operates against the canonical frameworks UK regulators, insurers, and procurement teams reference.
Adjacent decisions UK buyers weigh alongside a Managed SOC.
MDR vs SOC vs SIEM
Plain-English comparison of the three terms procurement teams confuse most often.
See comparisonSOC as a Service
Per-endpoint pricing model from £4/endpoint at 2,000 users. Same SOC, different commercial wrapper.
See SOCaaSOutsourced SOC
Why most UK orgs land on outsourced rather than building in-house: £210k/year headcount floor and 6 to 12 month build time.
See outsourced SOCSOC as a Service: Human analysts watching your environment 24/7.
Most IT teams are not security teams. When an alert fires at 11 PM on a Friday, the person on call is fielding password resets, not triaging ransomware precursors. Our analysts work in shifts from a physical facility in Newcastle. The screens are always watched by someone whose only job is threat detection.
Book a Scoping CallWhat Our Managed
SOC Covers.
Six integrated capabilities, delivered by CREST-accredited analysts from our physical UK facility. Every alert is triaged by a human. Every finding is validated before escalation.
SIEM & Log Correlation
We ingest logs from everywhere: Microsoft 365, firewalls, workstations, and cloud platforms. Our cloud-native SIEM correlates events across your entire digital estate, aligned to NCSC in-house SOC building guidance, while EdgeProtect continuously monitors your external attack surface for exposed services and compromised credentials.
Managed EDR
We deploy and manage Endpoint Detection & Response agents (Microsoft Defender, SentinelOne, CrowdStrike) to stop ransomware at the process level. Every endpoint alert is triaged by a human analyst, not an automated playbook.
Threat Hunting
We apply our Offensive Security roots (CREST) to hunt against the full MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise matrix, surfacing enablers of compromise that automated tools miss: dormant lateral movement paths, misconfigured Conditional Access policies, and overprivileged service accounts waiting to be exploited. Our analysts are trained against the SANS threat hunting roadmap.
Immediate Critical Triage
When a critical alert fires, the on-shift analyst begins triage immediately, ahead of all lower-priority work. All confirmed threats are escalated to your designated contacts via your preferred communication method. This is not a ticket queue or an automated email.
EdgeProtect ASM
Continuous monitoring of your external attack surface: exposed services, vulnerable software versions, subdomain takeover risks, and compromised credentials on dark web markets. Findings feed directly into SOC detection rules for closed-loop protection.
Compliance Reporting
Monthly service review calls, audit-ready event logs with 12-month retention, and documented SLA performance. Satisfies ISO 27001 A.8.16, NIS2 continuous monitoring, and DORA operational resilience requirements.
Advantage of Precursor SOC
Building an in-house SOC is hugely expensive. Outsourcing delivers equivalent or superior capability at a fraction of the cost and time. See the full managed SOC cost breakdown.
Huge cost saving compared to an in-house SOC build. No recruitment, SIEM licensing, threat intel subscriptions, staff training, management overheads, or 24x7 shift patterns required.
Time to Operational
From contract to live monitoring in weeks, not months.
Infrastructure to Manage
No SIEM licensing, no analyst or management hiring, no tooling procurement. Fully managed by our CREST-accredited team.
Controls
The Precursor Advantage.
A physical UK facility with dedicated analysts, combined with offensive security integration that strengthens your defences every day.
See the SOC.
Visit our analyst floor in Newcastle. See the screens, meet the team, and watch a live threat hunt in progress. We run tours for procurement teams, CISOs, and board members. No sales pitch. Just evidence.
Book a SOC TourThe Closed-Loop Advantage.
Our penetration testers use live SOC threat intelligence to test your defences against active attack patterns. This continuous loop between offensive and defensive operations means your security posture strengthens every single day.
We work with your existing stack.
No rip-and-replace. We integrate with your current SIEM, EDR, and cloud platforms from day one.
Microsoft Sentinel
Microsoft Defender
CrowdStrike Falcon
SentinelOne
Elastic Security
Azure / Entra ID
AWS CloudTrail
Cloudflare
Managed SOC Pricing
We publish our pricing structure because scope ambiguity is a form of commercial dishonesty. Every tier shows exactly what is included. If your situation does not fit neatly, a scoping call takes 30 minutes and results in a fixed quote.
Fully Managed SOC
Turnkey OperationsWe handle everything. 24/7 monitoring, detection, and response across endpoints, cloud, and network. Your virtual security team protecting you around the clock.
Hybrid Cloud SOC
Targeted CoverageTargeted monitoring for specific assets (AWS/Azure environment, OT/IoT networks) or specific compliance requirements such as PCI-DSS or NIS2.
Onboarding Workflow
Most organisations are fully operational within 2-3 weeks. Four stages from scoping call to 24/7 monitoring.
Scoping & Contract
30-minute scoping call to assess your log sources, user count, and existing tooling. Fixed monthly price confirmed before work begins.
Connector Deployment
Lightweight agents and API integrations deployed to your Microsoft 365, Azure, firewall, and EDR platform. Typically 3-5 business days.
Baseline & Tuning
Behavioural profiling of your environment and detection rule tuning to eliminate false positives before 24/7 monitoring begins.
24/7 Monitoring Live
Full 24/7/365 monitoring active. Monthly service review calls, quarterly threat reviews, and continuous detection engineering.
What You Get
Every managed SOC engagement includes the following, regardless of tier.
All service tiers include our proprietary Threat Intelligence Feed, Rapid Incident Response SLA, and CREST-accredited analyst oversight.
Strengthen Defences.
Test What You Protect.
Your SOC detects threats. Our penetration testers validate whether those defences hold. We feed pentest findings directly back into SOC detection rules, building custom alerts for your specific attack surface. This is the closed-loop advantage.
Explore Penetration TestingPenetration Testing
Validate your SOC detections with manual exploitation by CREST-accredited testers.
Red Team Operations
Full-scope adversarial simulation to test your SOC team under realistic attack conditions.
EdgeProtect ASM
Continuous external attack surface monitoring, included with every SOC tier.
Configuration Reviews
Harden the infrastructure your SOC monitors with expert configuration assessment.
SIEM vs MDR vs XDR vs SOC
Four overlapping terms that buyers often treat as interchangeable. The distinction matters, because each has a different scope, cost envelope, and operational role. For the full five-way breakdown including EDR, see our MDR vs SOC vs SIEM vs EDR vs XDR buyer's guide.
| Dimension | SIEM | MDR | XDR | SOC |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | Log collection, correlation, alerting | Outsourced endpoint-led threat response | Integrated detection across endpoint, email, cloud, identity | People, process, and tools combined for monitor→alert→respond |
| What it is | A platform | A service | A platform | A capability (people + tech + process) |
| Action vs alert | Alerts only; investigation stays with you | Detect + contain + remediate | Alert + automated/semi-automated response | Full operational loop, end-to-end |
| Coverage scope | Any log source you connect | Endpoint-centric, plus cloud/identity | Vendor ecosystem (single-stack) | Whatever the customer needs monitored |
| Typical UK cost | £50k–£200k/yr licensing alone | £900–£5,000/month | £60k–£180k/yr per vendor stack | £900–£12,000/month outsourced; £500k+/yr in-house |
| Ideal for | Teams that want visibility but retain response | Orgs needing outsourced 24/7 response | Single-vendor-committed estates | Orgs that want the full managed capability without building it |
Precursor's Managed SOC includes SIEM (Microsoft Sentinel or Elastic), MDR-grade endpoint monitoring, and XDR-style cross-layer correlation within one CREST-accredited UK service, so you don't have to stitch the categories together yourself.
Full Services Catalogue
Comprehensive penetration testing services tailored to your environment.
Internal Testing
Post-perimeter assessments targeting Active Directory, lateral movement, privilege escalation, and segmentation validation from inside your network.
Talk to a SOC Analyst, Not a Sales Team.
Most organisations who complete a scoping call receive a formal proposal within 48 hours. The call takes 30 minutes. You will speak with a SOC analyst who understands your environment, not a salesperson reading from a script.
Managed SOC: Common Questions
Pricing, onboarding, coverage, and compliance.
A managed SOC is an outsourced 24/7 security operations centre: an external team of analysts who monitor your environment, investigate alerts, and contain threats on your behalf, without you building the capability in-house.
- Correlates telemetry across your whole estate, SIEM logs, endpoint (EDR), identity, cloud and network, not just one layer.
- Human analysts triage and respond in real time, rather than leaving alerts in a queue until Monday.
- Delivered as a monthly service (from £900/month with Precursor), so there is no recruitment, tooling, or 24/7 rota to run yourself.
Precursor's managed SOC runs from a physical, CREST-accredited facility in Newcastle with UK-based, DBS-checked analysts, and includes managed EDR alongside SIEM monitoring.
An MSSP manages a broad set of outsourced security products (firewalls, antivirus, VPNs); a managed SOC is specifically the 24/7 detection-and-response function, run by analysts who hunt and contain threats.
- MSSP is breadth: device and policy management across many tools, often with limited real-time human threat analysis.
- Managed SOC is depth: continuous monitoring, correlation, threat hunting, and human-led incident response focused on stopping attacks.
- A managed SOC can sit inside an MSSP relationship, but the SOC is the part that actually detects and responds to live threats.
A SIEM is the technology that collects and correlates security logs; a SOC is the people and process that use it. A SIEM without a SOC just generates alerts nobody is watching.
- SIEM: the platform (Microsoft Sentinel, Elastic) that ingests logs and raises alerts from correlation rules.
- SOC: the analyst team that tunes those rules, investigates the alerts 24/7, and responds to confirmed threats.
- A managed SOC includes SIEM management, so you get the platform, the tuning, and the human response as one service.
Managed SOC services start from as low as £900 per month, scaling to £12,000+ depending on organisation size, log volume, and service tier. Entry-level managed SOC for small organisations (50-100 users, basic log sources) starts from £900/month including 24/7 monitoring and incident alerting. Standard managed SOC for mid-sized organisations (100-500 users, EDR + cloud logs) typically costs £3,000-£4,000/month with threat hunting and dedicated analyst support. Enterprise SOC for large organisations (500+ users, complex multi-cloud environments) ranges £8,000-£12,000+/month with dedicated analyst teams. We provide fixed monthly pricing after a free scoping call.
MDR is endpoint- and cloud-workload-focused; a managed SOC is broader, correlating network, identity, cloud, application and firewall telemetry alongside endpoints across your whole estate.
- Coverage: a SOC is broader across the estate; MDR is deeper on endpoints.
- Human involvement: good SOC services include human threat hunters; many MDR offerings are heavily automated.
- Compliance output: SOC services produce the audit-trail evidence frameworks require, ISO 27001 A.8.15/A.8.16/A.5.25, NIS2 Article 21(2)(b) and 23, and DORA Article 17 and 10.
In practice the categories overlap. Precursor's managed SOC includes managed EDR alongside SIEM monitoring, so it covers both.
Even a small in-house SOC team of three analysts costs upwards of £210,000 per year in salaries alone, before SIEM licensing, tooling, threat intelligence subscriptions, training, and management overhead. A full 24/7 capability requires additional headcount to maintain continuous coverage, pushing total costs significantly higher. Outsourced SOC services start from £900/month and include the platform, tooling, analyst team, and management. Most organisations also find that an outsourced SOC is operational within 2-3 weeks, versus 6-12 months to build an internal capability.
Most organisations are fully operational within 2-3 weeks. The process has four stages: (1) Scoping call and contract signature (Day 1-3); (2) Log connector deployment to your environment (Days 3-7, typically involving installing a lightweight agent or configuring API integrations with Microsoft 365, Azure, your firewall, and EDR platform); (3) Log ingestion begins and baseline behaviour profiling starts (Days 7-14); (4) Detection rules tuned to your environment and full 24/7 monitoring begins (Days 14-21). Organisations with complex multi-cloud environments or large numbers of data sources may require 4-6 weeks for full coverage.
Internal IT and a managed SOC do different jobs: IT keeps systems running; a SOC is trained and staffed specifically to detect and stop attackers, around the clock.
- IT staff focus on availability and support; they are not trained to detect credential abuse, lateral movement, or fileless malware.
- True 24/7 cover needs at least five security analysts (£40,000-£70,000 each) plus management, far more than a managed SOC costs.
- Detection needs specialist SIEM/EDR skills, threat intelligence, and detection engineering that IT generalists do not have.
- Alert fatigue is real: internal teams facing 500+ daily alerts desensitise, while SOC analysts work refined playbooks.
- Cyber insurance increasingly requires 24/7 monitoring by qualified security professionals.
Most organisations keep internal IT for administration and outsource threat detection to a specialist SOC.
Yes. Our Security Operations Centre is staffed 24/7/365 from our physical UK facility in Newcastle. We monitor your environment around the clock, including weekends and public holidays. Every analyst is UK-based. We do not use follow-the-sun offshore models.
We specialise in Microsoft Sentinel and Elastic. We can also ingest logs from any source using our custom collectors. For organisations without an existing SIEM, we can deploy and manage the platform as part of the service.
When a critical alert fires, the on-shift analyst drops all lower-priority work and begins immediate investigation. All confirmed threats are escalated to your designated contacts via your preferred communication method, with a phone call for high-severity incidents.
Yes. Precursor Security operates a physical UK-based Security Operations Centre in Newcastle. We do not use a follow-the-sun model with offshore analysts. Every analyst is UK-based, DBS-checked, and CREST-accredited, with no offshoring of work.