The $3 Million Security Operations Decision Nobody Gets Right
Why Fortune 1000 companies are rethinking the shared MDR model and what it means for enterprise cybersecurity strategy.
The email arrived at 2:47 AM on a Tuesday. A critical security alert from the company's managed detection and response provider. By the time the CISO saw it at 6:30 AM, submitted a ticket for escalation, and finally connected with an analyst on a scheduled call at 11:00 AM, eight hours had elapsed. The threat actor had moved laterally through three systems.
This scenario plays out with alarming frequency across enterprise organizations, and it highlights a fundamental misalignment between what security operations teams need and what many MDR providers can structurally deliver. As cyber threats grow more sophisticated and regulatory scrutiny intensifies, a quiet revolution is taking place in how the world's largest organizations approach security operations.
The question is no longer whether to outsource security monitoring. The question is what kind of partnership model can actually protect an enterprise in 2025.
The Hidden Cost of Shared Resources
Managed detection and response services have become a $3.4 billion market, promising 24/7 monitoring, threat hunting, and incident response at a fraction of the cost of building an internal SOC. For mid-market companies, the value proposition is clear. But for Fortune 1000 organizations with complex infrastructures, stringent compliance requirements, and board-level cyber risk discussions, the shared service model increasingly shows its limitations.
"The challenge isn't whether your MDR provider has talented analysts," explains a CISO at a Fortune 500 financial services firm who recently made the switch to a dedicated SOC model. "It's whether those analysts can develop the institutional knowledge of your environment that makes the difference between catching an incident in minutes versus hours."
The mathematics of the shared model create inevitable constraints. A typical MDR provider manages security operations for 30 to 50 clients simultaneously. Analysts rotate through shifts monitoring multiple client environments. When an alert fires, they're reviewing it through the lens of generalized playbooks and standardized response procedures, not deep familiarity with your specific infrastructure, business processes, or threat profile.
For organizations where security isn't just about compliance checkboxes but represents genuine business risk, these constraints have real consequences.
The difference becomes stark when examining how security operations teams interact with the broader organization. Traditional MDR services operate through ticketing systems and scheduled calls. Communication flows through formal channels with defined service level agreements. An analyst might take 30 minutes to respond to a ticket, two hours for a callback, or a business day for a detailed investigation.
Contrast that with a dedicated security operations center embedded directly into the organization's communication infrastructure. When analysts have direct access to Slack channels, participate in daily standups, and maintain ongoing relationships with IT, audit, and executive leadership, the operational dynamic fundamentally changes.
Consider vulnerability management. An MDR provider identifies a critical vulnerability through automated scanning and opens a ticket with remediation recommendations. A dedicated SOC analyst who has been embedded in the organization for months understands that the affected system is part of a revenue-generating application with a scheduled maintenance window next Tuesday. They know the application owner personally, understand the deployment pipeline, and can coordinate remediation that balances security urgency with business continuity.
This contextual knowledge compounds over time. After two years of partnership, a dedicated SOC team has institutional memory about past incidents, understands the organization's risk appetite, recognizes normal versus suspicious behavior patterns, and has established trust relationships across the enterprise. That intellectual capital cannot be easily replicated in a multi-client shared service model.
Enterprise security architectures have become extraordinarily complex. A typical Fortune 1000 organization might deploy 40 to 60 different security tools: endpoint detection and response, network monitoring, cloud security posture management, identity and access management, data loss prevention, and specialized tools for specific compliance requirements or operational technology environments.
MDR providers address this complexity through standardization. Their service catalog defines which tools they monitor, which integrations they support, and which types of alerts they analyze. Step outside that catalog and you're looking at contract amendments, additional costs, and scope change negotiations.
For organizations with diverse, evolving technology stacks, this creates a persistent gap between security coverage and actual infrastructure. The new cloud security platform the development team adopted? Not in the MDR service scope. The specialized industrial control system monitoring for manufacturing operations? Requires a separate engagement. The custom application that represents the company's competitive advantage? Falls outside standard coverage.
A dedicated SOC operates without these artificial boundaries. The team's mandate is comprehensive security coverage across the entire organization, adapting to new tools, technologies, and business initiatives as they emerge. When the engineering team wants to deploy a new technology stack, security isn't a blocking conversation about whether the MDR contract covers it.
Perhaps the most significant distinction between models lies in the type of work security operations teams perform. Traditional MDR services excel at monitoring and alerting. Analysts review security events, triage alerts, and respond to incidents based on established playbooks.
Enterprise security organizations need something more: security engineering. This includes developing custom detection rules tuned to the organization's specific threat profile, building automation workflows that reduce alert fatigue, optimizing tool configurations to improve detection accuracy, and creating bespoke integrations between security systems and business applications.
One CISO at a global manufacturing company described the difference: "Our MDR provider was good at telling us when something happened. Our dedicated SOC helps us prevent things from happening in the first place. They're constantly tuning our detection capabilities, hunting for gaps in our coverage, and building custom solutions for our unique operational challenges."
This engineering capability becomes particularly valuable as organizations face increasingly sophisticated threat actors. Generic detection rules catch generic attacks. Stopping targeted threats requires analysts who understand your crown jewel assets, know how adversaries might target your specific industry, and can develop defenses tailored to your actual risk profile.
For regulated industries, security operations documentation and audit trails represent more than operational necessity. They're regulatory requirements with material financial and legal consequences. When auditors ask detailed questions about incident response procedures, detection capabilities, or security control effectiveness, the quality and depth of answers matters.
Dedicated SOC teams provide comprehensive documentation because they're focused on a single organization's compliance requirements. They participate directly in audit meetings, maintain detailed records aligned with regulatory frameworks, and can provide the kind of contextual explanation that auditors value.
MDR providers produce standardized reports across multiple clients. When compliance questions require detailed investigation into specific security events or control implementations, organizations often discover that the level of documentation and institutional knowledge available through a shared service model doesn't meet enterprise audit standards.
At the executive level, the SOC model decision represents more than an operational choice. It's a strategic question about how security operations align with business objectives and risk management philosophy.
Board members increasingly view cybersecurity as a business risk, not just an IT function. They ask CISOs about security posture, incident readiness, and whether security operations capabilities match the organization's threat profile. The ability to provide detailed, contextual answers to these questions depends on having security operations partners who deeply understand the business.
"When I brief our board on security operations, I'm not talking about service level agreements and ticket response times," notes a CISO at a Fortune 100 technology company. "I'm explaining how our security team integrates with product development, how we balance security and innovation, and how our detection capabilities align with the threats we actually face. That conversation requires security partners who are truly embedded in the business."
Making the Decision
The choice between dedicated and shared security operations models isn't binary. Some organizations operate hybrid approaches, using MDR services for baseline monitoring while building dedicated capabilities for critical systems or specialized requirements. Others phase implementations, starting with MDR and transitioning to dedicated models as security maturity and resource requirements grow.
What has become clear is that for large, complex organizations with sophisticated threat profiles and high-stakes security requirements, the shared MDR model increasingly represents a ceiling on security operations capabilities. The question facing CISOs isn't whether to invest in security operations, but what investment model best serves their organization's specific risk profile and business objectives.
The $3 million question in the headline reflects a typical enterprise security operations budget. Whether that investment goes toward a shared service that monitors your tools or a dedicated partnership that becomes an extension of your security team represents one of the most consequential decisions a CISO will make.
As one security executive put it: "We're not buying monitoring. We're investing in a security partnership that will protect our organization for years to come. That requires a fundamentally different model than what most MDR providers can deliver."
The organizations getting this decision right aren't necessarily spending more on security operations. They're spending strategically, building security capabilities that scale with their business and align with their actual risk profile. In an era where a single security incident can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and fundamentally impact enterprise value, that strategic alignment matters more than ever.
About GotPentesting
With global security operations teams across the United States, Europe, Singapore, and India, GotPentesting provides dedicated security operations center services and offensive security capabilities to enterprise organizations worldwide.
