How a 24/7 Security Operations Center actually works

A Security Operations Center (SOC) is the team responsible for monitoring, triaging, and responding to security events around the clock. Mature SOCs follow a tiered model. Tier 1 analysts triage alerts from the SIEM and EDR, applying playbooks to enrich, classify true and false positives, and either close the alert or escalate. Tier 2 investigates real incidents, pulling host artifacts and network evidence, and runs the initial response. Tier 3, sometimes called threat hunting and incident response, drives proactive hunts and major incidents.

A 24/7 model means three or four shifts. The follow-the-sun approach uses geographically distributed teams — a Baku SOC handing over to a Manila SOC at 18:00 local time is operationally efficient and avoids night shifts that erode quality. For Azerbaijani companies that cannot staff three shifts internally, managed detection and response (MDR) providers like Arctic Wolf, Expel, Sophos MDR, and regional providers cover off-hours with hybrid SOC models.

Metrics drive performance. Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) measures how fast an event becomes an alert. Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) measures triage to containment time. Healthy targets for a tuned SOC are MTTD under 30 minutes and MTTR under 4 hours for high-severity. False positive rate per detection rule should be tracked monthly — rules above 50 percent FP get retired or rewritten. Coverage against MITRE ATT&CK is mapped via the ATT&CK Navigator and reviewed quarterly.

Tooling includes the SIEM, EDR/XDR, a SOAR platform (Tines, Torq, Cortex XSOAR, Microsoft Sentinel Playbooks) for repeatable response, a case management system (TheHive, ServiceNow SecOps), and threat intelligence platforms (MISP, Anomali, Recorded Future). Build the runbook library before scaling headcount — without runbooks, a SOC is just a pager. Document playbooks for the top 20 alert types, automate the easy 60 percent of triage steps, and reserve human attention for what actually matters.