SOC as a Service
Your network doesn't clock out at five. Neither does our SOC.
CyNtell's SOC as a Service delivers 24/7/365 monitoring, triage and response run by our own analysts, not a dashboard we hand you and leave you to watch.
We collect the telemetry your systems already produce, watch it around the clock, investigate what matters, and tell you exactly what to do, with the evidence trail your auditors, your insurer and your contracts require.
Serving commercial businesses, regulated industries and government contractors nationwide.
One week, 168 hours
Intrusions are timed for the gap, nights, weekends and holidays.
Schedule a scoping call
Tell us about your environment and we will follow up to set a time.
What is SOC as a Service?
SOC as a Service (SOCaaS) is a subscription that gives an organization the capability of a 24/7 security operations center without building one. Security analysts monitor the organization's existing systems around the clock, investigate the alerts those systems generate, and respond to confirmed intrusions. It replaces the alternative of hiring a rotation of in house analysts, which takes roughly five people: a week contains 168 hours, a full time analyst covers 40, and the resulting 4.2 becomes about five once leave, training and turnover are allowed for.
CyNtell operates its own SOC with its own analysts rather than reselling a third-party platform. Our SOC covers four functions: 24/7 threat monitoring, vulnerability management, patch management, and compliance management. It is sold as a flat monthly fee and serves commercial businesses, regulated industries, nonprofits, state and local government, and federal contractors nationwide.
- Service
- SOC as a Service from CyNtell (CyNtelligent Solutions, LLC)
- Coverage
- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, all 168 hours of every week
- Delivered by
- CyNtell's own security analysts, in house, not a resold or white labeled third party platform
- What is monitored
- Endpoints, identity provider, network edge, cloud tenant and servers, using the security tools the client already owns
- Included services
- Threat monitoring and triage · vulnerability management · patch management · compliance evidence management
- Response targets
- Analyst triage within 15 minutes, client contact and containment within 1 hour, written incident report within 72 hours, for a confirmed Severity 1 incident
- Tiers
- Monitor (notify and advise) · Respond (pre authorized containment) · Regulated (framework defined retention and evidence)
- Pricing model
- Flat monthly fee by tier, scoped to the environment. No per alert charges and no after hours surcharge
- Frameworks evidenced
- SOC 2 · NIST CSF 2.0 · HIPAA Security Rule · PCI DSS 4.0 · ISO/IEC 27001 · CMMC 2.0 Level 2 · NIST SP 800-171 · DFARS 252.204-7012
- Served from
- Washington, DC area, clients nationwide, across commercial, nonprofit, state and local government, and federal contracting
How it compares
SOC as a Service vs. MDR vs. MSSP vs. an in-house SOC
These four terms get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. The practical differences are in what is covered, who acts when something is found, and who carries the compliance evidence.
| SOC as a Servicee.g. CyNtell | MDR | MSSP | In-house SOC | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it covers | Whole environment, endpoints, identity, network, cloud, servers | Usually the vendor's own detection agent and the telemetry it produces | Device and tool management, often alongside general IT | Whatever you build and staff for |
| Who investigates | Named analysts who learn your environment | Vendor analysts, pooled across customers | Often ticket based, business hours for anything non urgent | Your employees |
| Who contains the threat | The provider, under authority you grant in advance | The provider, within the agent's reach | Usually notifies; you act | Your team |
| Coverage hours | 24/7/365 | 24/7/365 | Varies, check the contract | Needs roughly 5 analysts to cover 168 hours |
| Tool replacement | Works with what you already run | Typically requires the vendor's agent | Often requires their stack | You buy and run everything |
| Compliance evidence | Produced and control mapped as part of the service | Varies; usually detection records only | Varies widely | Yours to build and maintain |
| Cost shape | Flat monthly subscription | Per endpoint or per user, monthly | Per device or per tool | Salaries, tooling, and 24/7 rotation overhead |
| Best when | You need coverage and evidence, and want to keep your existing tools | Endpoints are the main risk and you accept the vendor's agent | You want IT and security operations from one vendor | You are large enough to staff a rotation and want full control |
CyNtell's SOC as a Service sits in the first column: full environment coverage using the tools you already own, with containment authority and audit evidence included. Where an MDR agent genuinely fits your risk better, we will say so during scoping rather than sell around it.
What you are actually buying
A SIEM is a tool. A SOC is people who read it.
Plenty of companies already own the technology. They bought the SIEM, turned on the EDR, enabled logging in Microsoft 365, and now several thousand alerts a month arrive somewhere nobody reads. The tooling was never the hard part. Someone has to look at it at two in the morning, decide which alert is real, and act before it spreads.
Your environment
Collect & correlate
machine speed
Analyst triage
human judgment
Verified incidents
what you are contacted about
Raw alerts are absorbed by the SOC. What reaches you is the small number that are real and need a decision.
What changes once our SOC is on
Coverage
Someone is accountable for your telemetry at 3 a.m. on a Sunday, the hours attackers deliberately choose because that is when nobody is looking.
Signal
Your team stops receiving raw alerts. We absorb the noise, chase down what is ambiguous, and contact you only when something is real and needs a decision.
Response
We do not just tell you an endpoint is compromised. We isolate it, cut the session, disable the account, and walk your IT team or MSP through the rest.
Evidence
Every alert, investigation and action is logged and retained, which is what turns "we monitor our systems" into something you can actually put in front of an assessor or an insurer.
What our SOC covers
Four services, run as one
Monitoring on its own finds problems it cannot fix. Our SOC pairs detection with the two disciplines that shrink the attack surface in the first place, and with the reporting that proves all of it happened.
Threat intelligence and monitoring
Continuous collection and correlation across your endpoints, identity provider, network edge, cloud tenant and servers, watched by analysts, enriched with current threat intelligence, and tuned to your environment so the alerts that fire are the ones worth firing.
What we do
- 24/7/365 monitoring and alert triage by CyNtell analysts
- Detection rules tuned to your systems, not shipped defaults
- Threat hunting against current adversary tradecraft
- Indicator feeds matched against your traffic and identities
What you receive
Verified incidents with severity, scope and recommended action, plus a monthly report of what was seen, what was dismissed, and why.
Vulnerability management
Scanning is easy; deciding what to fix first is the work. We scan on a set cadence, remove the false positives, and rank what is left by what an attacker could actually reach from outside, so your team spends its remediation hours where they change your risk.
What we do
- Authenticated internal and external scanning on an agreed cycle
- Validation and false positive removal before anything reaches you
- Risk ranking by exploitability and exposure, not raw CVSS
- Remediation tracking through to verified close
What you receive
A ranked, de duplicated remediation queue with owners and due dates, and a trend line showing whether your exposure is actually shrinking.
Patch management
Most breaches use a vulnerability that had a patch available. The gap is rarely awareness, it is that patching competes with everything else on the IT queue. We take the cycle off your team: test, schedule, deploy, verify, and report the exceptions honestly.
What we do
- Operating system and third party application patching on a defined window
- Pilot group testing before broad deployment
- Emergency out of band patching for actively exploited flaws
- Documented exceptions and compensating controls where a system cannot be patched
What you receive
Monthly patch compliance by asset class, with every exception named, justified and dated rather than quietly omitted.
Compliance management
Continuous monitoring is not just good practice, it is written into the frameworks you answer to. We map what our SOC produces directly to the controls it satisfies, so the monitoring you are already paying for does double duty as audit evidence.
What we do
- Log retention set to your framework's requirement, not a vendor default
- Control mapping across the audit, monitoring and incident response families
- Evidence packages assembled for assessors, auditors and insurers
- Incident reporting support, including the 72 hour DoW clock under DFARS 252.204-7012
What you receive
Audit ready artifacts on request: retention proof, alert histories, investigation records and response timelines, indexed to the control each one supports.
How an alert is handled
The clock starts the moment the signal lands
Detection only counts if response follows it. This is the path a confirmed critical incident takes through our SOC, from the first signal to a written report, and, where a defense contract applies, to the federal reporting deadline that follows.
Targets for a confirmed Severity 1 incident. Lower severities follow the same path on a longer clock.
How fast does CyNtell's SOC respond to a confirmed critical incident?
| Elapsed time | Stage | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| T + 0 | Signal | Telemetry fires and SOC correlation runs against it. |
| Within 15 minutes | Triage | A CyNtell analyst confirms the alert is a true positive and assigns severity. |
| Within 1 hour | Contain | Your designated contacts are called and the affected host is isolated. |
| First 24 hours | Eradicate | The threat is removed and affected systems are restored. |
| Within 72 hours | Report | Written incident report issued. Where DFARS 252.204-7012 applies, CyNtell supports reporting to DIBNet inside the same 72 hour federal deadline. |
| Day 5 | Debrief | Lessons learned documented and detection rules retuned. |
Severity 1 · Critical
Active compromise
Ransomware, confirmed data exfiltration, domain level account takeover. You are contacted by phone, day or night, and containment begins before the call ends.
Severity 2 · High
Credible threat
Suspicious privileged access, malware contained on one host, impossible travel sign in. Contacted within the hour with the investigation already underway.
Severity 3 · Routine
Noted and tracked
Policy violations, low confidence detections, hygiene findings. Batched into your regular report rather than interrupting anyone's evening.
We publish these targets because a monitoring service that will not commit to a response time is selling you a dashboard. Your contracted service levels are set at scoping and written into your agreement.
Service tiers
Three levels of coverage
Every tier is watched by the same CyNtell analysts against the same response clock. What changes between tiers is how much we are authorized to do without waiting for you, and how much compliance evidence comes with it.
Tier 1
Monitor
You have capable IT staff who will act on what we find. We watch, verify and hand off.
Coverage
24/7/365 monitoring and triage
Response
Notification and written guidance; your team executes containment
Also included
Quarterly vulnerability scanning, tuned detection rules, monthly summary report
Best for
Businesses with an internal IT team and no formal regulatory monitoring requirement
Tier 2
Respond
You want the threat stopped, not just reported. We are authorized to contain it ourselves.
Coverage
24/7/365 monitoring, triage and active response
Response
Pre authorized containment, host isolation, session revocation, account disable, then handoff for recovery
Also included
Everything in Monitor, plus monthly vulnerability scanning, managed patching, threat hunting, and an incident response plan and annual tabletop
Best for
Companies with a lean IT team, an MSP, or customers and insurers asking how incidents get handled
Tier 3
Regulated
Your monitoring has to satisfy a framework and survive an assessment, not just work.
Coverage
Everything in Respond, on framework defined terms
Response
Pre authorized containment plus regulatory reporting support, including the 72 hour DoW incident clock
Also included
Extended log retention to your framework's requirement, control mapped evidence packages, assessor and auditor support, quarterly compliance review
Best for
CUI environments, CMMC Level 2 scope, HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2 and other assessed programs
Our SOC as a Service is billed as a flat monthly fee by tier, a predictable line item you can budget and pass through, with no per alert charges and no surcharge for nights, weekends or holidays. The fee is set at scoping against the size and shape of your environment: how many endpoints and identities, how many sites and cloud tenants, and what retention your framework requires. Request a scoped quote.
What our SOC evidences
The monitoring you already need, mapped to what requires it
Almost every framework a business answers to contains the same three demands: collect logs, review them, and respond to what they show. Our SOC produces that evidence as a byproduct of doing the work, so you are not reconstructing it the week before an audit.
Commercial and regulated
Where customers, insurers and regulators set the bar
Government and defense
Where the requirements arrive as contract clauses
Who we monitor
Continuous monitoring is not a defense-contractor problem
A municipal government, a multi site retailer, a research nonprofit and a financial services firm. Different sectors, different regulators, different reasons for needing a SOC, and the same underlying requirement to watch what is happening and be able to prove it.
Municipal government
City of Oldsmar
Oldsmar, Florida
A city government runs what amounts to several businesses at once, utilities, public safety, permitting, payroll and resident records, on a budget set in public and a staff that does not include a night shift.
Drives the requirement
Critical public services · resident PII · public sector breach disclosure
Multi-site retail
Autobell Car Wash
Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina
A family owned chain taking consumer card payments across dozens of sites in several states. Every location is a point of sale, a network edge and an endpoint, which makes the estate wide, distributed and hard to watch from one place.
Drives the requirement
PCI DSS 4.0 · distributed sites · payment card data
Research nonprofit
Child Trends
Rockville, Maryland
Applied research on children, youth and families, conducted with federal and state agency funding. The data is exactly the kind that carries obligations to the agencies and institutional review boards that authorized its collection.
Drives the requirement
Sensitive research data on minors · federal grant conditions · agency data use agreements
Financial services
Wachob Financial
East Bloomfield, New York
A small firm holding the complete financial records of many other small businesses, books, payroll and tax filings. Compact estate, concentrated consequence: one compromise reaches every client at once.
Drives the requirement
FTC Safeguards Rule · IRS Pub. 4557 written security plan · client financial records
The environments differ enormously, a car wash chain and a research institute have almost nothing in common technically. What they share is that somebody outside the organization now expects continuous monitoring, and expects it evidenced. Ask us what yours would look like.
Relevant only if you are pursuing CMMC certification. Commercial clients can skip this.
Assessor independence
If we monitor you, someone else certifies you.
CyNtelligent Solutions is an Authorized C3PAO, accredited by the Cyber AB to perform CMMC certification assessments. CMMC ethics rules prevent a C3PAO from assessing an organization whose security it has helped operate, and we do not look for room in that rule.
Option A
We will name several and prepare you for their process.
Option B
The choice is made openly at the start, in writing on day one.
So for CMMC clients the choice is made openly at the start: either CyNtell's SOC runs your monitoring and your certification assessment goes to an independent C3PAO, we will name several and prepare you for their process, or we conduct your assessment and your monitoring stays elsewhere. You get that answer in writing on day one, before you sign anything. It applies to CMMC certification only and has no bearing on commercial engagements.
Our authorization is verifiable on our Cyber AB Marketplace listing.
Why CyNtell
Monitoring built by people who also sit on the audit side
Our own analysts
Our SOC is staffed and operated in house. When you escalate, you reach CyNtell, not a vendor's overflow queue three time zones away.
We know what evidence holds up
We perform certification assessments as well as monitoring, so we build the evidence trail knowing exactly how it will be scrutinized.
Small-business economics
A 24/7 in house SOC needs roughly five analysts to cover the rotation. Our SOC as a Service gives a 30 person company that coverage as one monthly line item.
One firm, full bench
Monitoring, vulnerability and patch management, penetration testing, Fractional CISO leadership and CMMC assessment under one roof.
Common questions
SOC as a Service questions we get every week
What is SOC as a Service?
SOC as a Service, also written SOCaaS, gives you the capability of a security operations center without building one. You get 24/7 monitoring, analyst triage and incident response as a subscription, using your existing systems as the data sources, instead of hiring a rotation of analysts and buying the platform they would need. CyNtell delivers it with our own in house team.
How is this different from what my MSP or IT provider already does?
An MSP or IT provider keeps your systems running: uptime, patches, help desk, new user setup. Our SOC watches those systems for compromise around the clock and acts when one is found. Most MSPs do not staff a 24/7 security operations function, and the ones that resell a security tool rarely have analysts reading it at 3 a.m. Our SOC can sit alongside your existing MSP and cover exactly that gap.
Do I need to replace my existing security tools?
No. Our SOC as a Service is built to work with the security tools you already own, your EDR, your identity provider, your firewall, your Microsoft 365 logging. We collect the telemetry those systems already produce rather than requiring you to rip them out and adopt a vendor stack. If there is a genuine gap in coverage, we will tell you during scoping instead of selling you a replacement you do not need.
Does CMMC or NIST 800-171 require a SOC?
Neither CMMC nor NIST SP 800-171 names a SOC by that word, but both require capabilities that a SOC delivers: continuous audit logging, log review, and incident detection and response. NIST SP 800-171 carries requirement families for Audit and Accountability, System and Information Integrity, and Incident Response, and CMMC 2.0 Level 2 assesses them. A SOC is the practical way most organizations satisfy those controls and produce the evidence to prove it.
What happens if you find something at 2 a.m.?
For a confirmed critical incident, CyNtell analysts triage within 15 minutes, call your designated contacts within the hour, and begin containment, isolating the host, revoking the session, disabling the account, before the call ends. Nights, weekends and federal holidays are covered at no surcharge, because that is exactly when intrusions are timed to land. Lower severity findings are batched into your regular report rather than interrupting your evening.
How long does it take to get SOC as a Service running?
Onboarding typically runs a few weeks from signed agreement to full coverage, depending on the size of your environment and how many data sources need connecting. We start by mapping your telemetry sources and tuning detection rules to your systems, so the alerts that fire are the ones worth acting on. You get a scoped timeline at the end of the scoping call, not a vague promise.
What does SOC as a Service cost?
CyNtell's SOC as a Service is billed as a flat monthly fee by tier, with no per alert charges and no after hours surcharge. The fee is set at scoping against the size and shape of your environment: how many endpoints and identities, how many sites and cloud tenants, and what log retention your framework requires. A short scoping call is enough for us to price it and give you a predictable monthly figure you can budget and pass through.
Can CyNtell monitor us and also perform our CMMC assessment?
No. CMMC ethics rules prevent a C3PAO from assessing an organization whose security it helps operate. So for CMMC clients the choice is made openly on day one, in writing: either CyNtell's SOC runs your monitoring and an independent C3PAO runs your certification assessment, and we will name several, or CyNtell conducts your assessment and your monitoring stays elsewhere. This applies to CMMC certification only and has no bearing on commercial engagements.
Do you work with companies outside the Washington, DC area?
Yes. CyNtell is headquartered in the Washington, DC area and serves clients nationwide. SOC as a Service is delivered remotely by design, we collect telemetry from your systems wherever they are, so your location does not limit coverage. We monitor commercial businesses, regulated industries, nonprofits, state and local government, and federal contractors across the country.
What is the difference between SOC as a Service and MDR?
MDR, managed detection and response, usually centers on the vendor's own detection agent and the telemetry it produces, with analysts pooled across many customers. SOC as a Service covers your whole environment, endpoints, identity, network, cloud and servers, using the tools you already run, with named analysts who learn your setup and compliance evidence produced as part of the service. Where an MDR agent genuinely fits your risk better, CyNtell will say so during scoping.
Is SOC as a Service worth it for a small business?
For most small businesses, yes, because the alternative is either no coverage or an in house rotation that is out of reach. A 24/7 SOC needs roughly five analysts to cover 168 hours a week, which no 30 person company can justify hiring. SOC as a Service gives that same coverage as one monthly line item, and it is often what a customer security review, an insurance renewal, or a contract clause is actually asking for.
Does SOC as a Service replace our antivirus or endpoint protection?
No. Our SOC does not replace your antivirus or EDR, it watches them. Your endpoint protection is one of the telemetry sources our SOC monitors: our analysts read what it reports, correlate it with signals from your identity provider, network and cloud, investigate what matters, and respond to confirmed threats. The tools detect; the SOC is the people who read them and act.