How to evaluate the value your Security Operations Centre (SOC) delivers
Your Security Operations Centre represents one of your largest cybersecurity investments. Whether you're running an in-house SOC or relying on a managed SOC provider, it consumes significant budget, resources, and attention. Yet many IT and Security leaders struggle to answer a fundamental question: Is our SOC actually delivering the value we need?
If you're nodding along, you're not alone. The challenge isn't just about having a SOC in case you suffer a breach; it's about having one that meaningfully advances your security posture while justifying its considerable cost.
Understanding what “value” means for you
Before diving into benchmarks and metrics, step back and define what effective cybersecurity risk management looks like for your organisation. For a financial services firm, value might mean maintaining compliance within a highly regulated jurisdiction. For a manufacturing company, it could be preventing operational technology disruptions that halt production lines.
Your SOC's value proposition should align directly with your business risk tolerance and operational requirements. Without this foundational understanding, you can fall into the trap of measuring activity instead of impact, which can lead to a sense of false confidence in SOC performance.
Beyond the dashboard: Meaningful metrics you should be measuring
Most SOC dashboards are populated with vanity metrics that look impressive but reveal little about actual security effectiveness. Alert volume, ticket closure rates, and uptime percentages tell you what happened, not whether you're safer.
Instead, focus on outcome-based metrics that demonstrate security improvement over time. Mean time to containment for different threat categories shows whether your team is getting faster at stopping attacks that matter. False positive rates by detection source reveal which tools are creating noise versus signal.
The best SOCs also measure their impact on business continuity. How often do security incidents affect business operations? When they do, how quickly are they contained, and services restored? These metrics connect security performance to business outcomes that the leadership team cares about.
Key Performance Metrics
- Vulnerability Management Progress: Vulnerabilities include all classes of weaknesses (beyond patchable software and hardware flaws) and are prioritised against the asset value and likelihood of compromise.
- Asset Discovery: A comprehensive IT asset register is maintained where deltas are highlighted and deviations from the organisation’s configuration baseline are raised as incidents.
- Events > Alarms > Incidents Statistics: Events and incidents should trend downwards over time whilst alarms trend upwards as the analysts further refine the environment detection baseline.
- SLA achievement: Largely a commercial metric regarding response, resolution and up-times. The true test however is 15-minute response during true positive P1 incidents.
- Program and milestone updates: Ongoing enhancements, extensions and continuous improvements delivered by the service engineering team to achieve full coverage of the estate and attack surface.
Detailed Performance Metrics
- Number of Total Alerts: How many alerts have been received, across the detection sources?
- Number of Reported Incidents: How many incidents are reported within a certain timeline across a particular attack chain stage?
- Number of Open Alerts Escalated: How many open alerts were escalated further?
- Number of devices being monitored: How many devices are being monitored?
- Number of false / true positive alerts: How many false and true positive alerts did the SOC encounter in a week/month? Should the near miss reporting framework be invoked?
- How long it takes to become aware of a potential security incident? Mean Time to Detect (MTTD).
- How long is it taking to resolve an actual security incident? Mean Time to Respond (MTTR).
- How long is it taking to complete an investigation process? Mean Time for Investigation.
- Event To Alarm Ratio – a key indicator of SOC tuning to reduce noise and enhance alarm reporting.
- Alarm to Incident Ratio – a key indicator of growing analyst situational awareness in the organisation.
- SOC and SIEM availability.
Getting the best ROI from your security tools
The SOC is simply another security control, selected along with other security measures, and implemented as part of a risk management strategy. Ultimately, the ability of all the deployed security controls, working together as a system to reduce and mitigate risks, need to be measured against their cost, to determine if the value delivered justifies the spend. Control variance is the degree to which actual outcomes differ from expected or average outcomes, reflecting inconsistency or unpredictability in their performance or results – this must be measured and managed.
That kind of visibility is where an outsourced SOC can really shine — offering an outside-in perspective on your environment while freeing up your internal team to focus on strategy.
For example, high volumes of alerts regarding phishing mails that are successfully delivered to mailboxes can indicate a missing, misconfigured or ineffective email security control. A SOC can therefore reduce the frequency and duration in control variance.
Analyst efficiency and burnout
Your SOC analysts are your most valuable (and most vulnerable) asset. Alert fatigue, stress and burnout don't just affect morale; they directly impact your security posture when experienced analysts cannot operate effectively during long running incidents. Whether your SOC is in-house or outsourced, you need to manage analyst health as carefully as system uptime.
Monitor analyst workload distribution and escalation patterns. If senior analysts are spending most of their time on tier-one activities, you're wasting expensive expertise and creating bottlenecks. Track training completion and skill development to ensure your team is growing alongside evolving threats.
If your SOC doesn’t operate 24/7, pay particular attention to after-hours incident response. If your team is consistently pulled into weekend and evening emergencies, you either have a control gap or a process problem - both of which will eventually manifest as a retention problem.
Continuous SOC Improvement
Your SOC should be constantly improving and contributing to the wider augmentation of your cybersecurity posture. If your Security Operations Centre hasn’t evolved in the last two years, it's likely falling behind.
Consider things like the total cost of false positives - not just analyst time, but the business disruption caused by unnecessary incident response activities. A SOC that generates fewer, higher-quality alerts often delivers better outcomes at lower total cost than one that alerts on everything. Track your detection coverage against the MITRE ATT&CK framework and business specific risk use cases to understand gaps in your defensive capabilities.
The SOC engineering team should also be constantly integrating new data sources into the SIEM to consolidate logs from across the IT estate to achieve as close to 100% coverage. This presents opportunities to raise recommendations to increase security maturity and plug control gaps discovered through the service expansion.
Continuous Improvement Metrics
- Reduction in false positives / spurious alarms over time
- Reduction in high priority vulnerabilities over time
- % Coverage of threat use cases (tested through threat hunting and other exercises)
- % Coverage Critical Components – attack surface coverage and risk reduction
- Number of recommendations / improvements made.
Reviewing incident case studies and lessons learned
Your incident response history is a treasure trove of SOC and security control performance data, yet many companies fail to systematically analyse it. Regular case study reviews reveal whether your SOC is getting better at handling the threats that matter most to your business.
Look for patterns in your major incidents over the past year. Were they detected by your SOC or reported by users? How long did containment take, and what were the primary delays? Which tools and processes performed well, and which created friction during critical response activities?
In addition, it can be highly revealing to track whether lessons learned from previous incidents resulted in environmental changes or improved performance during subsequent similar events. A SOC that doesn't demonstrably improve after each major incident isn't learning - it's just repeating.
Signs you've outgrown your current SOC model
Several indicators can suggest your current SOC approach (in-house or outsourced) may no longer fit your business needs:
- You're consistently missing threats that other security controls detect.
- You need 24/7 coverage, and your 9 – 5 team is working evenings, weekends and bank holidays to provide it.
- Analysts spend more time managing tools than investigating threats.
- Analysts are ignoring alerts due to the sheer volume and irrelevancy.
Geographic expansion, cloud adoption, and business model changes often outpace SOC evolution. If your SOC was designed for a traditional perimeter-based network but you're now defending a distributed, cloud-first environment, misalignment between threats and capabilities becomes almost inevitable.
Perhaps most critically, if your executive team has stopped asking about SOC performance because they've lost confidence in its strategic relevance, you've moved from a security asset to a compliance checkbox - an expensive and ultimately ineffective position to be in.
For more useful tips on the signs you should be considering an outsourced SOC, read our recent article.
Is it time to rethink your SOC strategy?
The question isn't whether you need security operations - you definitely do. The question is whether your current approach is the right fit.
Whether you’re considering a managed SOC provider, expanding your current SOC, or switching to an outsourced SOC model, now is the time to evaluate if your approach still fits your risk, business, and threat landscape.
If your SOC feels like an expensive necessity rather than a strategic advantage, it's time for an honest evaluation. Consider whether organisational changes, technological evolution, or threat landscape shifts have created gaps between your SOC's design and your actual security needs.
The best SOCs automate processes and evolve continuously, adapting their people and technology to maintain relevance and effectiveness. If yours hasn't meaningfully changed in the past two years, it's probably falling behind - and taking your security posture with it.
Your Security Operations Centre deserves the same scrutiny you’d apply to any other major business capability. Make sure it’s earning its keep.
If you're exploring your options, our complete guide to SOC outsourcing provides a detailed look at the benefits, challenges and what to look for in a partner.
