Reaching true 24/7 security operations is very achievable, even for lean teams. The key is pairing a security operations center (SOC) that runs around the clock with compliance-ready logging and an escalation plan.
You don’t need to build a large internal SOC to get there. Managed EDR is a model that is continuously backed by a SOC and provides monitoring, investigation, and response without the cost and complexity of staffing and operating your own team.
Start by understanding what you already have—your tools, people, and processes. From there, you can select a provider that fits your environment, supports safe automation, and helps you respond quickly when something goes wrong.
Assess your current security operations capabilities
A security operations center (SOC) continuously monitors, triages, and responds to security events across your environment. If you don’t have one in-house, you can obtain these capabilities through a managed SOC provider or SOC-as-a-Service. For a clear breakdown of what a SOC does and how it’s structured, see our overview of what a SOC is and how it works.
Opting for Managed EDR platforms like Huntress Managed EDR is one practical way to achieve this. You get always-on monitoring, human investigation, and guided or fully managed response. As you evaluate options, think about whether you prefer:
A fully managed SOC that handles detection, triage, and most response actions
A co-managed or hybrid model where your team handles some alerts/automation and the provider handles the rest
A more automated, tool-first approach where your internal team leads, and you lean on your Managed EDR + SOC provider for complex or high-severity incidents
Inventory your stack, processes, and coverage
Next, map what you already own and how it’s being used.
Tools: List every security and operations tool in your stack, including:
SIEM or log management
EDR/XDR
Identity tools (e.g., Entra ID/Azure AD, Okta), email security, and cloud security
Vulnerability management
Ticketing/ITSM platforms
Note which products are integrated and where you still rely on manual work, spreadsheets, or ad hoc scripts.
Processes: Document your current alert handling:
How alerts arrive (email, dashboards, tickets)
Who investigates them
Whether you have written playbooks or rely on tribal knowledge
How you capture evidence and decisions
Focus on steps that are repeated frequently, are slow, or depend heavily on one or two individuals.
Coverage: Chart out when people are actually watching your environment:
Working hours by time zone
On-call schedules
Gaps on nights, weekends, and holidays
These uncovered time windows are where 24/7 Managed EDR + SOC support can make the biggest difference.
Document pain points with concrete examples
Capturing specific pain points helps you set priorities and evaluate providers realistically.
Common issues include:
Alert fatigue: High volumes of low-value alerts from SIEM or EDR tools make it difficult to see real threats. Incident-response practitioners frequently track false-positive rates and alert-to-case conversion as key metrics for this reason.
Missed after-hours incidents: Suspicious lateral movement, privilege escalation, or risky sign-ins often occur overnight and go unnoticed until the next workday.
Slow response: Mean time to respond (MTTR) is measured in days because actions like isolating a host or disabling an account require multiple manual steps and approvals.
Tool sprawl and manual log review: Logs are spread across many tools and platforms, forcing analysts to pivot between systems and slowing investigations.
Write these down with real examples (“We first saw X at 01:12, but no one acted on it until 09:30”). Those details will help you ask better questions about SLAs, automation, and workflows when you evaluate providers.
Clarify the operating model you’re targeting
With the baseline and pain points in hand, define where you want to land.
Outcomes: Set service-level objectives (SLOs) for detection and response. For example:
Critical alerts triaged within 15 minutes, 24/7
High-severity alerts contained or clearly escalated within about an hour
These kinds of targets are in line with what many SOCs track for MTTD and MTTR.
Escalation: Decide in advance:
How you classify severity
Which communication channels you use (phone, email, paging, chat)
Who can approve which containment actions
High-impact actions—like tenant-wide password resets or broad network blocks—should remain under explicit human approval.
Compliance: Identify the compliance frameworks and contractual obligations that apply to you (e.g., ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA). Most will require:
Centralized logging
Defined retention periods
Evidence of investigations and incident handling
Define your required retention windows and decide where that data will live (native hunting platform, SIEM, or both). Managed SIEM offerings, such as those described in Huntress’ explanation of what managed SIEM is and why it matters, can take on much of this burden for lean teams.
Automation guardrails: Decide which actions should be automated and which require human review. Good candidates for automation include:
Host isolation
Blocking known malicious indicators (IPs, domains, hashes)
Revoking sessions or suspending clearly compromised accounts
Actions with a wide blast radius should have an additional approval step, especially in smaller organizations where a single error can have broad impact.
What to look for in a 24/7 triage and response platform
When you evaluate providers, look for the following capabilities.
1. A 24/7 staffed SOC with clear SLAs
Confirm that the provider:
Investigates and triages critical alerts 24/7
Publishes SLAs (for example, critical alerts acknowledged within minutes)
Provides clear escalation paths and communication expectations
2. Safe, well-governed automated containment
NIST’s SP 800‑61 Rev. 3 emphasizes integrating incident response into broader cybersecurity risk management and improving the effectiveness of incident detection, response, and recovery. Your provider should support:
Endpoint isolation
File quarantine
Blocking malicious indicators
Session suspension
Account disablement
Look for sensible defaults, plus options to require analyst or customer approval before high-impact changes are applied.
3. Integrated detections across your environment
Attacks typically move between endpoints, identities, email, SaaS, and cloud services. The platform should:
Correlate signals across these surfaces
Reduce duplicates and purely noisy alerts
Elevate high-fidelity incidents with enough context for quick decisions
4. Compliance-ready logging and archives
You’ll need:
Centralized log ingestion or export to your SIEM
Retention options that match your policy and regulatory needs
Exportable timelines, case notes, and analyst decisions for audits and post-incident reviews
5. A good fit for lean teams and MSPs
You should expect:
Transparent, predictable pricing (no opaque per-GB log fees)
Straightforward onboarding
Playbooks and processes that assume a small IT or MSP team, not a large enterprise SOC
Embed automation without losing control
Automation should reduce manual work and response times, without introducing unnecessary risk.
Start with low-risk automated actions
Automate actions that are easy to reverse and have limited business impact, such as:
Isolating endpoints
Killing clearly malicious processes
Blocking well-known bad indicators
Temporarily suspending obviously compromised accounts
Tie automation to clear evidence requirements
Define the conditions under which automation is allowed to run, for example:
Multiple corroborating signals (endpoint + identity + email)
A known malicious hash combined with suspicious behavior
This approach mirrors how mature SOCs tune detection and response pipelines: they focus on reducing the time to act after there is enough signal to justify containment.
Keep humans in the loop for high-impact steps
For changes that could disrupt many users or systems:
Provide full context to analysts
Require an on-call security or business approver before applying the change
Test via tabletop exercises
Run tabletop exercises to validate:
Escalation paths and approvals
SLAs for triage and response
Automation guardrails and rollback procedures
Tabletop exercises are one of the best ways to discover gaps before a real incident forces you to rely on those processes.
Measure what matters
Once 24/7 coverage and automation are in place, measure whether they’re actually improving outcomes. Below are a few common examples of metrics to consider tracking:
Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)
Measure the average time between the start of malicious activity and initial detection. With continuous monitoring from a Managed EDR + SOC provider, you should see MTTD shorten, especially for off-hours activity.
Mean Time to Respond (MTTR)
Measure the time from detection to effective containment and remediation. Many SOCs use severity-based targets (for example, critical incidents addressed within roughly an hour) instead of a single global number.
Automation rate
Track the share of incidents that are:
Contained automatically
Contained through assisted workflows
Resolved manually from end to end
Growing automation on well-understood patterns is a sign that playbooks and tools are maturing.
False-positive rate
Monitor alert-to-case conversion and the proportion of alerts that turn out to be benign. If too many alerts result in no real action, your detections may need tuning; if you rarely see alerts but still experience significant incidents, you may have coverage gaps.
Compliance and audit readiness
Confirm that you can:
Export incident timelines, alerts, and analyst notes
Prove that retention policies match your stated requirements
Reconstruct major incidents in a way that satisfies auditors, insurers, or regulators
Bringing it all together
If you’re a lean IT team or an MSP, focus on Managed EDR that can provide:
24/7 triage and investigation
Automated, reversible containment
Runbooks and workflows that align with your current stack and staffing
Compliance-ready logging and archiving, either natively or via clean SIEM integrations
The Huntress managed security platform is one example of this approach. It combines Managed EDR, identity protection (Managed ITDR), SIEM-informed detections, and security awareness training—backed by a 24/7 SOC built for SMBs and the MSPs who support them. Check out our Huntress 24/7 SOC overview to learn more.
And keep the high-level goals in mind when evaluating vendors:
Contain threat actors in minutes rather than days
Reduce noise and focus attention on real incidents
Preserve complete evidence for audits and post-incident reviews
With the right Managed EDR + SOC partner, you can achieve that level of protection without building and running a large SOC on your own.
Protect What Matters
