Why Outsourced Monitoring Isn’t Enough
Do you believe your MSSP or SOC provider is threat hunting for you? It’s a common assumption. Leaders invest in managed services to provide 24/7 coverage, and those services are expensive, which feels natural to assume they include everything necessary to keep an organization safe. But monitoring isn’t hunting, and the difference is more important than many realize.
Monitoring’s Role and Its Limits
MSSPs and SOCs provide valuable functions. They watch logs, dashboards, and alerts around the clock. They escalate incidents when thresholds are crossed and keep businesses aligned to compliance and reporting requirements. They excel at handling what’s happening right now, and this is critical work. Without it, many organizations would struggle to keep pace.
Monitoring is reactive by design. Its purpose is not to investigate what hasn’t triggered an alert. That’s where the assumption becomes risky. These services succeed by creating standardized, repeatable processes across many customers. Hunting, by contrast, is unique to each environment and hypothesis. One company’s normal could be another’s red flag.
Those are resources MSSPs and SOCs don’t have the cost structure to dedicate at scale. Most analysts are measured by speed, efficiency, and the ability to process alerts quickly. Spending hours investigating subtle anomalies for a single client simply doesn’t fit their operating model. So, if you’re assuming your SOC or MSSP is already hunting for you, you may be relying on a layer of protection that doesn’t exist.
What Gets Missed Without Hunting
This is not just a theoretical gap. A compromised account using valid credentials can log in with MFA, access cloud applications, and quietly download large volumes of data without raising a single alert. An attacker who uses built-in tools like PowerShell can move through systems by blending into what looks like routine administrative activity. These tactics don’t always trip alarms, but they can be pieced together by hunting. This work requires taking an incident response mindset to proactively investigate threats by connecting the dots across historical activity.
The cost of assuming hunting is included can be significant risk. MSSP and SOC contracts are not cheap, and many leaders understandably believe they’ve “checked the box” for security once those services are in place. But when an incident happens and questions are asked, the blind spot becomes painfully clear. Monitoring was never designed to catch what it wasn’t configured to see. The fallout is not just the breach itself but it’s the regulatory exposure, the business downtime, the loss of brand trust, and the erosion of executive confidence in the security strategy.
Compared to those risks, hunting is a small investment with big advantages. It doesn’t replace monitoring; it completes it. Hunting checks that your controls work as expected. It uncovers activity that slipped past detection, and it gives leaders confidence that a quiet dashboard means safety, not just silence.
Think of it this way: monitoring is your alarm system. It’s excellent at sounding when the door is kicked in. Hunting is the investigator who checks the locks, reviews the footage, and makes sure no one is already inside. One without the other leaves gaps. Together, they create assurance.
MSSPs and SOCs are indispensable parts of a modern security strategy, but they aren’t hunting for you. Their operating model isn’t designed for it, and assuming otherwise leaves blind spots open to attackers who know exactly how to avoid triggering alerts. Silence on your SOC dashboard isn’t assurance. Threat hunting is how you get it.