About SecurityOperationsCost.com
An independent vendor-neutral reference for the cost of running a security operations center. Built by Digital Signet for CISOs, IT directors, and security leaders who need a defensible budget number that does not come from a vendor sales deck.
Prices verified: May 2026
Why this site exists
Every SOC cost guide on the open web is written by someone with a SOC product to sell. MSSPs anchor their numbers around their own monthly fee. SIEM vendors anchor around their own per-GB rate. SOC-as-a-service providers anchor around their tier pricing. None of them count the cost component their own product does not provide.
The result is that a CISO building a SOC business case for the CFO reads five vendor pages, each with a confidently-stated headline figure that differs by 3x to 5x. None of them are wrong. They are each measuring a different slice of the same elephant.
This site exists to write the SOC cost guide that no SOC vendor can write. Independent ranges for the in-house FTE bill, the SIEM platform fee, the SOAR and EDR add-ons, the SOC manager loaded cost, the facility and training overhead, and the pieces every vendor leaves out. The figures are bands not points; the bands are wide enough to include the realistic 500-employee company and the realistic 50,000-employee enterprise.
Who runs this
SecurityOperationsCost.com is built and maintained by Oliver Wakefield-Smith at Digital Signet, a UK-based independent consultancy that publishes cost-reference sites across security, compliance, and developer-tooling categories.
Digital Signet does not sell MSSP services, MDR services, SIEM tooling, SOC staffing, or any product that benefits from a particular cost figure being correct. The portfolio of cost-reference sites is a network: each site cross-links to adjacent cost categories so the reader can assemble a multi-program security budget rather than just a SOC budget.
Sister sites in the same network include penetrationtestingcost.com, mdrcost.com, databreachcost.com, and soc2compliancecost.com.
Editorial position
This site is a reference, not a lead-generation funnel. There are no email gates on the SOC cost calculator, no gated whitepapers, no "talk to sales" buttons on an MSSP product, and no affiliate links to SIEM platforms or MDR providers. Where this site recommends a model (in-house, MSSP, MDR, SOCaaS, or hybrid) the recommendation is calibrated to organization size, coverage requirement, and budget, not to any commercial relationship.
What this site covers
Twelve content pages covering the full SOC cost question from initial model decisions to multi-year cost trajectory.
Editorial principles
Source pattern
Every cost band on this site triangulates three input streams: (a) the Ponemon Institute and IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, which are the only multi-year SOC and breach-cost datasets that survey a defensible cross-section of buyer organizations; (b) BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for the security analyst occupation (15-1212), which is the salary anchor that beats Glassdoor crowdsourcing; (c) vendor public pricing pages and named-source practitioner write-ups for SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and MDR contract values.
No paid placements
There are no sponsored slots, no pay-to-rank, no commercial relationships with any MSSP, MDR provider, SOC-as-a-service vendor, SIEM platform, or audit firm. Comparison tables order vendors by their published rate or feature coverage, not by any commercial relationship.
No affiliate parameters
Outbound links to vendor pricing pages (Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, IBM QRadar, Elastic, Sumo Logic, Datadog, Rapid7) are plain unaffiliated URLs. Cross-links to sister Digital Signet cost-reference sites (penetrationtestingcost.com, mdrcost.com, pcicompliancecost.com, databreachcost.com) are internal portfolio references, not affiliate links.
Monthly verification
Cost bands and vendor pricing references are re-verified against public sources on the first business week of each month. The current verified label reads May 2026.
Single-source freshness
The verification date is held in one constant (LAST_VERIFIED_DATE) imported by every page. Footer text, Article schema dateModified, and visible page headings all read from that single source so date drift across pages is structurally impossible.
Conservative band math
Where vendor marketing and practitioner SOC operators diverge on a cost figure, the site cites the wider band that includes both extremes. Headline figures (in-house $1M-$5M/yr, MSSP $50K-$500K/yr, hybrid $200K-$1M/yr) reflect the full SMB-to-enterprise spread, not a single vendor's pitch deck.
Methodology and sources
Detailed primary sources (BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, Ponemon Institute SOC Performance Report, IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, Gartner SIEM and SOAR Magic Quadrant references, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, SANS Cyber Security Survey), the calculation framework for the SOC cost calculator, the in-scope and out-of-scope coverage, and the corrections process are documented on the methodology page.
Contact and corrections
Spotted a band that does not match your recent MSSP quote, your SIEM contract, or a published SOC analyst salary? Email [email protected] with the figure and the source. We update bands within five business days of a verified correction.
Related cost references
Sites in the Digital Signet cost-reference network. Each follows the same editorial principles: independent, no paid placements, monthly verification, single-source freshness.
SecurityOperationsCost.com is not affiliated with any MSSP, MDR provider, SIEM platform, or SOC-as-a-service vendor. Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, IBM QRadar, Elastic, Sumo Logic, Datadog, Rapid7, CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and every other vendor referenced on this site are trademarks of their respective owners. We have no commercial relationship with any vendor cited on this site.