Delhi NCR · Operating since 2002
A 40-person company faces the same phishing kits, ransomware groups and six-hour CERT-In reporting clock as a 4,000-person enterprise — with no one watching. SOC as a Service rents you the watchers, and this page is honest about when that makes sense and when it does not.
This is the small-business companion to our main SOC as a Service page. It covers what an SME genuinely needs monitored, what you can skip, when you are too small for the service at all — we will tell you — and how per-asset packages work. Pricing mechanics are in our guide to SOC as a Service pricing in India; if your risk is mostly laptops and logins, MDR, EDR and XDR may fit better.
The threat picture
Why attackers increasingly target small companies
Three structural shifts made small businesses worth attacking at scale — and none is going away.
You are the soft way into someone bigger
If you supply, invoice or connect to a larger company, your mailbox and VPN are an entry point into their estate. Compromising a 30-person vendor to reach its enterprise customers is now standard, because the vendor’s emails are trusted and its defences are thin.
Automation erased the size filter
Phishing kits, credential-stuffing tools and internet-wide scanners do not check your turnover. A 25-person firm gets the same hostile traffic as a listed company; it just has no one whose job is to notice.
Nobody is watching at night
Ransomware deployments are timed for Friday nights and holiday weekends. In most SMEs the “security team” is the IT manager’s phone — which is asleep, exactly as planned.
The Indian variants are specific: invoice-redirection fraud aimed at the accounts team, and ransom demands scaled to what a small company can pay. And because backups, email and admin accounts often share one set of credentials, one phished password can take the whole business.
Scope, honestly drawn
What an SME actually needs monitored
Detection quality is decided by what you feed the platform. A small company’s estate is short and predictable — so complete coverage of it is cheap.
The channel most SME incidents still start in: phishing, malicious attachments and business email compromise aimed at your payments process.
Endpoints and laptops
EDR telemetry from every machine — including the director’s laptop and the accounts PC — so ransomware behaviour is caught before encryption completes.
Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace
Sign-in logs, impossible-travel logins, suspicious inbox rules and mass downloads — for most SMEs this is where the company actually lives.
Firewall
The perimeter you already own. VPN logins, policy changes and outbound connections to known-bad infrastructure, straight from syslog.
Website
Defacement, malware injection and uptime for the site your customers and your Google rankings depend on.
Cloud apps and file shares
Wherever the working data sits — shared drives, accounting software, the CRM — watched for mass deletion, encryption and exfiltration.
Just as important is what you do not need: OT monitoring, dedicated threat-hunting pods, premium threat-intelligence feeds, fifty log-source integrations, SOAR automation, a reserved SIEM instance. For 40 laptops, a firewall and an M365 tenancy that is coverage you will never use — buying enterprise scope for a small-business estate is the most common way SMEs overpay.
The honest entry point
When a small company is too small for SOCaaS
Below roughly 15–20 monitored assets, full SOC as a Service is usually the wrong purchase — and we will say so on the first call rather than sell you a subscription you do not need.
Under ~15–20 assets, start with hardening
EDR on every endpoint, MFA on every account, audit logging switched on and retained in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, a patched firewall, and backups tested by actually restoring them. That removes most of the risk most SMEs carry, for a fraction of a subscription.
“More monitoring fixes weak basics”
Monitoring an unhardened estate just gives you a front-row seat to your own incident. If MFA is off and the firewall firmware is three years old, spend the first rupees there — then buy the watch.
We would rather scope you honestly
A 30-person company told “not yet” today tends to come back at 60 people. A 30-person company sold the wrong package does not. The arithmetic is that simple.
Three things change the answer: a regulatory obligation inside a SEBI- or RBI-regulated supply chain; a customer contract requiring 24×7 monitoring as a condition of supply; or holding sensitive personal data at volume, where a DPDP breach notice is existential. Any of these drops the threshold and justifies the watch even on a small estate.
Right-sized, not cut-down
How SME packages are priced and scoped
Small-business packages are priced per monitored asset rather than per log source or data volume, so the bill is predictable and scales with the company. The unit economics are in our SOC as a Service pricing guide for India; here is what the scope looks like.
Scroll the table sideways →
| Component | SME package | Why it is enough | When to step up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Log sources | Firewall, M365 or Google Workspace, EDR, email security, website | Covers every path an SME attack actually takes — identity, endpoint, perimeter, inbox. | Add servers, Active Directory and line-of-business apps as the estate grows. |
| Analyst cover | 24×7×365 shared L1/L2 roster, L3 on escalation | The roster already exists; you buy a share of it — the point of the model. | Dedicated analysts once log volume justifies them. |
| Response authority | Included: isolate a host, disable an account, block a sender | Detection without containment is bad news delivered faster. Agreed in writing before go-live. | Wider playbooks as your own IT team matures. |
| Platform | Multi-tenant SIEM included — nothing to licence or buy | Platform cost is amortised across customers; you never see a licence line. | Dedicated instance if compliance or volume demands it. |
| Reporting | Monthly, written for an owner or IT manager, audit-ready | Incidents investigated, actions taken, and the evidence CERT-In and insurers ask for. | Board-level and regulator-mapped reporting on demand. |
We do not publish a headline “SME price” — a 25-asset services firm and a 60-asset manufacturer are different quotes. We scope the estate and quote a specific monthly figure, with the in-house comparison beside it and “not yet” an acceptable answer.
Compliance
The DPDP Act applies to small businesses too
There is no small-company exemption in the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. If your business holds personal data — customer records, employee files, a CRM — you are a data fiduciary, and the obligations attach regardless of headcount or turnover.
The duties that bite are operational rather than legal: reasonable security safeguards on personal data, and breach notification to the Data Protection Board and affected individuals. Statutory penalties run into hundreds of crores per class of failure. “Significant data fiduciary” status adds obligations for larger volumes; it exempts nobody below it.
CERT-In’s directions apply equally: specified incidents reported within six hours of being noticed, security logs retained for 180 days within Indian jurisdiction. The clock starts at noticing, not confirming — an SME with no monitoring typically learns of a breach from a customer on day nine, nine days after the deadline passed. Monitoring is how the deadline becomes meetable, and the retained log trail is how the notification becomes accurate instead of guessed. Our compliance services page maps these instruments to the evidence a monitored estate produces.
Getting started
How SME onboarding actually works
Enterprise SOC onboarding is a project. SME onboarding is not — no SIEM to install, no appliance to rack, because the platform already exists and your estate connects to it through standard connectors.
- Day 1–3: asset list and scoping — endpoints, email platform, firewall, where the data lives. This call is also where we tell you if you are too small.
- Day 3–7: connectors live. M365 and Google Workspace flow through API integrations; the firewall sends syslog; EDR agents report from each endpoint. No downtime.
- Week 2–3: baselining — the platform learns what normal looks like in your estate, so alerts that reach an analyst are worth an analyst.
- Day 30: first monthly report — what was seen, what was investigated, what was done, what we recommend you fix.
The honest constraint is tuning, not integration. A freshly connected estate is noisy; the first fortnight teaches the detections your normal — your CA’s month-end logins, your accountant’s weekend hours. Any provider promising reliable detection on day one is describing alerting, not detection. Expect meaningful coverage inside two to three weeks, getting quieter and sharper every month after.
Growing with you
The upgrade path as the company grows
A right-sized package is not a smaller service you will outgrow — it is the first rung of the same ladder our enterprise clients stand on, and nothing you buy at 30 people is thrown away at 300.
Growth moves the same dial in stages: add assets per unit as you hire; add log sources — servers, Active Directory, business applications — as the estate develops them; move from the shared roster to co-managed when you hire your own security person; add threat hunting when you become worth targeting deliberately. The detection content tuned to your business and your historical logs carry forward — you never restart from zero.
The reason a small company can trust this to us is the same reason a large one does: 50-plus in-house NOC and SOC engineers in Delhi NCR, operating since 2002, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified with the SOC inside the certified scope, and a commercial culture that would rather tell a 30-person company “not yet” than invoice it for the wrong thing. The generic model lives on our SOC as a Service page; this one exists because small businesses deserve the same honesty in a smaller font.
Straight answers
SOC as a Service for small business, answered
Is SOC as a Service affordable for a small company?
Yes, when it is scoped honestly. The expensive parts — the 24×7 roster, the SIEM platform, the specialist analysts — are shared across many customers, so a small company pays a per-asset subscription rather than anyone’s salary. One in-house analyst costs a full CTC and covers one weekday shift; a shared SOC covers every hour of the year. It stops being affordable when a provider quotes enterprise scope for an SME estate — which is why this page’s package is drawn around what a small company actually has.
What is the minimum company size for SOC as a Service?
There is no headcount rule, but there is an honest asset threshold. Below roughly 15 to 20 monitored assets — endpoints, firewall, email tenancy, website — full SOCaaS is usually more than you need, and we will say so. The better first spend is hardening: EDR on every machine, MFA everywhere, audit logging switched on in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, a patched firewall and tested backups. The threshold drops if a regulator, a large customer’s contract, or sensitive personal data makes continuous monitoring mandatory rather than prudent.
Do we need to buy a SIEM?
No. The platform is included in the service and its cost is amortised across customers, so you should never see a licence line on an SME quote. SIEM licensing scales with data volume and is priced for enterprises — the licence plus the people to run it is precisely the cost this model exists to remove. A small company buying its own SIEM usually ends up with expensive shelfware generating alerts nobody reads.
We use Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 — can you monitor that?
Yes, and for most SMEs it is the most valuable log source. Both platforms expose sign-in and audit events through standard API integrations — impossible-travel logins, MFA fatigue patterns, suspicious forwarding rules, mass downloads and privilege changes are all detectable. One requirement on your side: audit logging must be switched on and retained, which is part of the hardening baseline we recommend anyway. For many small companies, email plus workspace telemetry plus EDR is effectively the whole estate.
What does an SME package cost?
It depends on the number of monitored assets, which is why we quote per asset rather than publishing a headline figure — a 25-asset services firm and a 60-asset manufacturer are different quotes. What we can commit to is the shape: a predictable monthly subscription, no SIEM licence, no onboarding project fee, and a specific figure after a short scoping call. The cost drivers and the in-house comparison are laid out in our SOC as a Service pricing guide for India.
Does the DPDP Act apply to small businesses?
Yes. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 contains no small-company exemption: any business that decides why and how personal data is processed is a data fiduciary, with duties to safeguard personal data reasonably and to notify the Data Protection Board and affected individuals after a breach. The “significant data fiduciary” tier adds obligations for large volumes of sensitive data — it exempts nobody below it. CERT-In’s directions apply equally: specified incidents reported within six hours of being noticed, logs retained for 180 days within Indian jurisdiction.
How fast can we start?
Scoping takes one call. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace connectors are typically live within days, firewall and EDR telemetry inside the first week, and meaningful detection within two to three weeks. There is no SIEM installation and no on-premise project. We will not shortcut tuning: the first fortnight teaches the detections what normal looks like in your business — the difference between a SOC and a noise generator.
Can we scale up as we grow?
That is the design. You add monitored assets per unit as you hire, add log sources as the estate develops, and step up from the shared roster to co-managed or dedicated arrangements when volume justifies it. Detection content tuned to your business and your historical log trail carry forward, so nothing bought at 30 people is wasted at 300. The same ladder runs up to the fully managed engagements we run for large enterprises — you are buying the first rung, not a cut-down product.
Next step
Find out whether you are big enough yet
One scoping call: we count your assets, quote a specific per-asset monthly figure if monitoring makes sense, and tell you honestly if hardening is the right first spend instead. Either answer costs you nothing.
P J Networks Pvt Ltd · C-160, Mayapuri Phase II, New Delhi 110064
+91 98183 61787 · sanjay@pjnetworks.com
Related
Related to SOC as a Service for small business: the full SOC as a Service model explained, SOC as a Service pricing in India, MDR, EDR and XDR compared, our managed SOC services and SLA, compliance services for DPDP and CERT-In obligations, or talk to us about scoping your estate.