01
Detection fires
EDR or a log source flags suspicious behavior anywhere in your environment.
A managed SOC watching while you sleep
A security operations center is the team that watches your environment and acts when an attack appears. Building one in-house means tooling, threat intelligence and enough analysts to cover nights, weekends and holidays. Our managed SOC services deliver the same capability on a subscription: our analysts, our tooling, your environment, with a human reviewing every alert within 15 minutes around the clock.
24/7 monitoringManaged EDRThreat huntingIncident response15-minute analyst SLA
Alert queueLive15-minute SLA
CriticalImpossible travel — privileged accountAnalyst engaged · 04:12
Accountsvc_deploySourceacme-app-01.prodDetected11:04:22Escalated11:05:07
| Risk | Alert | Raised | Picked up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elevated | New admin role assigned | 10:51 | 02m 41s |
| Normal | Failed MFA ×6 | 10:38 | 07m 12s |
| Critical | Break-glass account used | 09:22 | 01m 05s |
| Normal | Dormant account re-enabled | 08:57 | 11m 38s |
Response15 minutesan analyst on every alert, in writing
The minutes that matter
What happens at 3am
The value of a SOC is not the dashboard. It is what happens in the minutes after detection, when nobody on your team is awake.
02
An analyst triages
A human reviews the alert within 15 minutes: true positive or noise, and how far it reaches.
03
Contain and notify
Pre-authorized containment runs immediately — isolate the host, disable the account — and you are notified by severity.
The alerts that matter most in practice are identity ones. A break-glass account used out of hours. Six failed MFA prompts in ninety seconds. A dormant account re-enabled on a Sunday. A new admin role assigned by someone who does not normally assign them. Those are the alerts a generalist SOC most often waves through, and the ones we are built to read, because privileged access is our core practice rather than a log source.
The SLA
What the SLA actually means
Every provider advertises a 15-minute response. Few say which clock they mean. Ours is specific.
| The clock | What it measures | Our commitment |
|---|---|---|
| Detection to analyst review | An alert fires; a human looks at it | 15 minutes, 24/7 |
| Analyst review to contact | We reach your named contact | By severity, agreed in the playbook |
| Contact to containment | From the moment we are talking to you | Maximum 4 hours, usually far less |
Why we contact before containing: more than once, the "incident" has been the client doing maintenance nobody told us about. Isolating a production host at 3am because a change window was not shared is its own outage, and it is the fastest way to lose a security team's trust. Where you want containment to run without a call first, that is agreed in writing per severity, in advance.
Scope
What is included
| Capability | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 24/7 SOC monitoring | Around-the-clock monitoring of endpoints, cloud, identity and email, with real-time response to alerts and anomalies |
| Managed EDR | Endpoint detection and response on every endpoint, flagging lateral movement, credential theft and malware before the damage spreads |
| Threat hunting | Human-led investigation for the threats that do not trip an alert: hidden persistence, and attackers already inside behaving like users |
| Incident response | Containment, remediation and post-incident reporting, including digital forensics that holds up under scrutiny |
| Automation and orchestration | Automated response workflows wired into the tools you already run, with one dashboard across the estate |
| Compliance reporting | Monitoring and logging evidence mapped to HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC 2 and NIST. See compliance readiness. |
| Email monitoring | Mailbox rule changes and post-compromise behavior watched as identity events. Pairs with email security. |
Getting started
Onboarding in two to four weeks
Deployment is usually measured in days. Full onboarding including tuning runs two to four weeks.
01
Deploy
Endpoint agents roll out; log connectors wire in firewalls, cloud, Microsoft 365, identity and email.
02
Tune
A shadow period where we watch without acting, calibrating detections to your environment so alerts mean something.
03
Agree the playbook
Escalation contacts and pre-authorized containment actions agreed in writing, by severity.
04
Go live
Full 24/7 coverage begins: monitoring, triage, response and monthly reporting.
The shadow period is the part that makes the difference, and it is the part most providers skip to show value faster. A SOC that goes live untuned spends its first month crying wolf, and by month two nobody reads the alerts. At that point you are paying for a service you have trained yourself to ignore.
1DeployEndpoint agents roll out; log connectors wire in firewalls, cloud, Microsoft 365, identity, and email.
days
2TuneA shadow period where we watch without acting — calibrating detections to your environment so alerts mean something.
shadow period
3Agree the playbookEscalation contacts and pre-authorized containment actions agreed in writing, by severity.
in writing
4Go liveFull 24/7 coverage begins — monitoring, triage, response, and monthly reporting.
The shadow period is the part that makes the difference — alerts that mean something on day one.
Proof
Managed SOC in practice
Government and telecommunications. Our engineers implemented centralized session monitoring across a hybrid VDI estate: session playback, keystroke and URL logging, custom alert policies and tamper-proof storage. The result was 100% visibility into high-density sessions and audit-ready evidence for national cybersecurity regulations. Grayscale recording kept storage consumption manageable at that density, which is the practical constraint nobody mentions until the disk fills.
Why Applied IAM
Why an identity firm runs a SOC
- Most intrusions are identity events. A stolen credential, a standing privilege, a session nobody watched. Those alerts are the ones we read fastest, because we spend the rest of our time closing them.
- One team, identity and detection. When the SOC flags a privileged account, the people who can fix the underlying access are in the same company — and often on the same call. That is part of managed IAM services.
- An SLA with a named clock. Detection to analyst review in 15 minutes, and we tell you exactly which clock that is rather than leaving it to interpretation.
- A tuned start. The shadow period is not optional and not billed as an extra phase.
- We do not replace your IT team. We watch and we escalate. Decisions about your environment stay with your people, because they have context we never will.
FAQs
Common questions about managed SOC
A security operations center run for you on a subscription. You get the monitoring, the analysts, the tooling and the response process without hiring a single analyst or buying a SIEM. The environment stays yours. The watching moves to us.
The terms overlap and vendors use them loosely. Managed detection and response usually describes the product-led version: a vendor's own tooling, their detections, their response playbook. A managed SOC describes the team-led version, working across whatever you already run. We are closer to the second, which matters if you have already bought tools you do not want to replace.
No. We watch, we triage and we escalate. Decisions about your environment stay with your people. What moves to us is the part that requires somebody awake at 3am.
Less than most people expect after onboarding, and more than expected during it. The two to four week onboarding needs someone who can grant access, confirm which systems matter and agree the escalation playbook. After go-live, the ongoing commitment is reading the monthly report and being reachable when something real happens.
Yes, and that is the usual case. We deploy agents and log connectors into whatever you run: your firewalls, your cloud, your Microsoft 365 tenant, your identity platform. We do not require you to move to our stack first.
Threat hunting, tuning, and vulnerability management: continuous scanning, prioritization and patching guidance so exposure comes down between penetration tests rather than only after one. A SOC that only does something when an alert fires is a SOC that is not paying attention.
Find out who is watching at 3am
A free consultation covers what you run, what is monitored today and what is not, and what onboarding would involve. You get the findings in writing.