Attacks don’t wait for office hours. Many intrusions start at night or at the weekend, precisely because nobody is watching. But a security team that watches around the clock is expensive. So what are the options for a company of 10 to 500 people?
The building blocks
Antivirus and EDR protect individual devices. Modern EDR (endpoint detection and response) also records what happens on a laptop or server and can stop suspicious behaviour. Essential, but it only sees the device it runs on.
Firewalls, VPNs, cloud consoles and email filters each produce their own alerts, in their own console.
A SIEM (security information and event management) collects logs from all those sources in one place and searches them for patterns. Powerful, but it needs someone to configure the rules and read the results.
A SOC (security operations centre) is the team that actually watches the alerts, investigates them and responds, ideally 24/7.
The three common options
1. Do it yourself
You buy the tools and your own IT team watches the alerts.
- Good for: companies with a dedicated security person and a modest attack surface.
- The catch: 24/7 coverage is practically impossible with one or two people, and alert fatigue is real.
2. Managed detection and response (MDR) or an outsourced SOC
A specialist company watches your environment for you and responds to incidents.
- Good for: companies with sensitive data, regulatory pressure and a budget for it.
- The catch: it is usually the most expensive option, and you depend on how well the provider understands your business.
3. A security monitoring platform (SaaS)
A cloud service collects your signals, enriches them with threat intelligence, links related alerts into incidents and tells you in plain language what to fix first, with alerts when something serious happens.
- Good for: growing companies that want 24/7 detection and clear priorities without hiring a security team.
- The catch: somebody in your company still needs to act on the alerts, or you combine it with an IT partner who does.
How to choose
Ask yourself four questions:
- Who acts at 3 a.m.? Detection without response is only half the job. Decide who gets the alert and what they may do.
- What do you need to show? If you fall under NIS2, or customers ask about your security, you need reports and evidence, not just alerts.
- What is reachable from the internet? The more VPNs, websites and cloud services you run, the more continuous external monitoring matters.
- Where may your data be stored? For many European companies, EU data residency is a requirement.
Many companies end up with a combination: EDR on every device, a monitoring platform that watches everything together, and an IT partner or MDR service for incident response.
How OZAG Security fits in
OZAG Security is option 3: a monitoring platform built for teams without a 24/7 SOC. It detects and correlates threats, monitors what is reachable from the internet, prioritises vulnerabilities attackers are using, writes reports for management and NIS2, and lets you ask an AI analyst what to do first. Hosted in the EU. Try it free for 14 days.