What is a Managed SOC and MDR?
A Managed Security Operations Center (SOC) is an outsourced 24/7 service that monitors your AWS environment for threats, triages every finding, and responds to incidents. Managed Detection and Response (MDR) extends a SOC with active threat hunting and automated containment — analysts use AWS-native services (GuardDuty, Security Hub, Detective, Security Lake) to detect, investigate, and stop attacks before they escalate.
Why a Managed SOC for AWS
The dominant security failure mode in AWS environments is not exotic exploits — it is alerts nobody acts on. GuardDuty fires; the finding lands in an inbox; nobody triages; the issue compounds; the breach happens later. Industry research is unambiguous on this: misconfiguration and ignored alerts cause the majority of cloud incidents.
A managed SOC closes that gap. We operate AWS-native detection 24/7, triage every finding above a defined severity, run automated containment for known threats, and engage human analysts when behavior breaks the runbook. The output is not “better alerts” — the output is alerts that get answered, evidence that gets logged, and incidents that get contained while they are still small.
What Our Managed SOC Covers
Detection Layer
- Amazon GuardDuty — continuous threat detection across compute, S3, EKS, RDS, and Lambda
- AWS Security Hub — aggregated findings from GuardDuty, Inspector v2, Macie, and Config
- Amazon Inspector v2 — agentless vulnerability scanning for EC2, ECR, and Lambda
- Amazon Macie — sensitive data discovery and unusual access pattern detection in S3
- Amazon Detective — behavior graphs for investigation
- Amazon Security Lake — OCSF-normalized telemetry for cross-source threat hunting
- AWS Network Firewall + WAF — Layer 7 attack detection and blocking
Response Layer
- EventBridge + Lambda — automated containment runbooks
- Step Functions — multi-step IR orchestration
- Systems Manager Automation — patch and remediation playbooks
- CloudTrail Lake — long-retention forensic queries
- Cross-account IAM roles — scoped permissions for our SOC analysts to operate inside your accounts
Reporting Layer
- Monthly SOC report (compliance-aligned)
- Weekly threat hunt summary
- Real-time dashboards for your security team and leadership
- Quarterly tabletop exercise reports
- Annual SOC maturity assessment
How Our SOC Operates
Tier 1 — Automated Containment
For well-understood threat patterns, response is real-time and automatic:
- Public S3 bucket detected → auto-remediated (Block Public Access reapplied)
- IAM credentials in code → owner notified, key rotation triggered
- Compromised EC2 reaching known C2 domains → quarantine security group attached
- Root account login → immediate alert + MFA forced re-auth
- Inspector v2 critical CVE on internet-facing resource → patching workflow opened
These runbooks are pre-approved during onboarding and execute without human pause. Notification still happens — but the threat is already contained.
Tier 2 — Analyst Triage
For findings that require context — is this a real threat or a false positive? — our analysts engage within the SLA window. Triage involves:
- Reviewing the finding in Security Hub and Detective
- Querying CloudTrail Lake for related activity
- Cross-referencing Security Lake for behavioral patterns
- Determining whether automated containment runbooks apply
- Engaging your team if incident declaration is warranted
Tier 3 — Incident Response
When a finding becomes an incident, our SOC leads the response:
- Declaration — formal incident ticket opened, severity assigned, stakeholders notified
- Containment — forensic snapshots captured before remediation
- Investigation — Detective and Security Lake analysis to map blast radius
- Eradication — credentials rotated, malicious resources terminated, vulnerabilities patched
- Recovery — verified restoration of affected services
- Post-incident review — written root-cause analysis, runbook updates, lessons-learned distribution
For organizations with regulatory obligations (HIPAA, GDPR, PCI), our IR process includes regulator notification timeline tracking — the 72-hour GDPR clock starts when GuardDuty alerted, not when you decided.
Onboarding Process
Week 1 — Environment Discovery
- AWS Organizations structure mapped
- Existing GuardDuty / Security Hub / Inspector / Macie state assessed
- Account criticality classification with your team
- Compliance scope confirmed (which frameworks, which controls)
- GuardDuty, Security Hub, Inspector v2, and Macie enabled organization-wide via delegated admin
- Security Lake stood up; OCSF data sources configured
- Cross-account IAM roles for our SOC, scoped via permission boundaries
- EventBridge rules and Lambda automation deployed
- Initial runbook approval with your team
Week 3 — Runbook Deployment
- Tier 1 automated containment runbooks deployed
- Tier 2 analyst triage workflows configured
- Tier 3 incident response playbook approved
- Notification channels (Slack, PagerDuty, email) wired
Week 4 — Handoff and Tabletop
- Initial threat hunt completed
- Tabletop exercise run against your specific architecture
- Monthly reporting cadence agreed
- 24/7 operations begin
Compliance Mapping
For organizations targeting multiple frameworks, our reporting consolidates evidence across all applicable controls — reducing audit prep time significantly.
Get Started
If your team is exhausted from triaging GuardDuty alerts, your last security incident took 6 hours to contain because nobody noticed for 4, or your compliance auditor is asking for “evidence of continuous monitoring” — let us run the SOC for you.
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