Four Questions MSSPs Should Ask When Evaluating SOC Platforms

Sep 18, 2026 · Original article ↗

Summary

A practical checklist advises MSSPs to scrutinize SOC platform billing, adversary-focused detections, alert context, and AI-agent oversight, and to test a platform against their own log sources before committing.

Key points

Confirm the billable unit, how data spikes affect costs, raw telemetry retention, and data portability.
Ask which detection rules are developed in-house for named, active adversaries rather than simply imported.
Check what threat intelligence and customer-specific context enrich events before they reach analysts.
Require AI agents to expose investigation tool-call traces, accept analyst-controlled context, and offer workflow-level autonomy settings.
Run the same log sources in parallel with the current platform and judge performance using the organization's own SOC.

Article Details

Topic: SOC platform evaluation criteria for managed security service providers (MSSPs), covering pricing, detection, threat context, and AI oversight.

People

Aurélie DoublierArticle author.

Vendors

SekoiaRunbook from an alert in Sekoia.3. The context nobody added

Products

Sekoia Intelligenceteam writes detections against named, active adversaries, and publishes the research behind them. Sekoia Intelligence is produced in-house and applied to every source at ingestion, so an alert opens already naming the

Industries

Managed security servicesis also your worst commercial one. An incident becomes a billing event, which directly affects managed security services margins, and you'll be explaining it to a customer who believes they bought a fixed price.