Managed security vs in-house: cost & reality for SMBs.

The real cost of building in-house

The mistake most leaders make is pricing in-house security as a single salary. It never is. To monitor and respond around the clock — which is the entire point, since attacks come at night and at weekends — you cannot rely on one or two people. You need a rota that covers every hour, which in practice means several analysts plus someone to lead them.

On top of headcount come the costs that don’t make the business case but always arrive:

• Tooling. Enterprise detection, SIEM and response platforms are licensed at enterprise prices, before anyone uses them.
• Recruitment and retention. Skilled security staff are scarce and move often; every departure means a gap in cover and a fresh recruitment cost.
• Training and tuning. Detection rules drift, threats evolve, and analysts need continuous development to stay effective.
• Coverage gaps. Holidays, sickness and turnover all create windows where nobody is watching — the most expensive risk of all.

Added together, genuine 24/7 in-house security is comfortably a six-figure annual commitment, and that’s before you account for the months it takes to hire and tune a team into something effective.

What managed security costs instead

Managed security flips the economics. Instead of carrying the full cost of analysts and tooling yourself, you share it across a provider’s entire client base. The same calibre of 24/7 SOC, the same Managed EDR platforms, the same response capability — billed to you per seat as a predictable monthly line item.

A standalone enterprise SOC can cost £2,000 a month or more before anyone is even watching it. Bundled into a managed service at per-seat pricing, that same protection becomes something an SMB can actually afford.

That bundling is the difference. We deliver Managed IT and Managed Security together — one bill, one SLA — so the cost of the people and the platforms is shared, not stacked on top of your payroll. You can see the full range on our services page.

Side by side

Here’s how the two approaches compare for a typical SMB:

	In-house team	Managed security
Upfront cost	High — hiring, tooling, setup	Low — onboarding only
Ongoing cost	Multiple salaries + licences	Predictable, per seat
24/7 cover	Only with a full rota	Included by default
Time to protect	Months to hire and tune	Days to weeks
Retention risk	Yours to carry	Carried by the provider
Tooling	You buy and maintain it	Included and kept current
Best for	Large organisations at scale	Most SMBs

When in-house starts to make sense

This isn’t a case of managed being right for everyone forever. There is a crossover point. Once an organisation is large enough that its per-seat managed cost starts to approach the cost of a full internal team — and it has specialised requirements a generalist provider can’t easily meet — building in-house becomes a rational choice.

For the great majority of SMBs, though, that point is a long way off. You’d need the scale to justify a full overnight rota before the numbers even begin to favour doing it yourself.

The hybrid reality

In practice, the line between the two isn’t sharp. Many growing organisations land on a hybrid model: they keep someone in-house to own security strategy, risk and the relationship with the business, while outsourcing the round-the-clock monitoring and response to a managed SOC.

That gives you internal ownership and accountability without paying for an overnight rota you don’t need yet. It’s often the most sensible destination as a business scales — and it’s a natural evolution from a fully managed start. If you’re weighing up where detection and response technology fits into all this, our explainer on EDR vs antivirus is a useful next read.