The evidence is stark: most successful intrusions unfold outside business hours, when teams are away and alerts pile up unread. For a bank or payment operator, a few hours of latency between initial compromise and first response is the difference between a contained incident and a crisis.
What a SOC concretely delivers
- Collection and correlation of security events (endpoints, network, cloud, business applications) in a SIEM.
- Continuous detection, enriched with threat intelligence targeting the African financial sector.
- Alert triage and prioritization by analysts — so the CISO is only woken when necessary.
- Incident response: containment, investigation, evidence preservation.
- Regulatory reporting: factual material ready for notification to authorities.
In-house, outsourced or hybrid?
An in-house 24/7 SOC requires at least ten analysts to staff three rotating shifts — hard to justify below a certain size, in a market where qualified profiles are scarce. Outsourcing pools skills and tooling under a contractual service commitment. The hybrid model, often optimal, keeps business knowledge and decision-making in-house while delegating continuous monitoring and deep expertise.
The metrics to demand from your SOC: mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), false-positive rate, coverage of critical sources, and regular simulation exercises. A SOC that cannot produce these numbers cannot be managed.
Optima Advisory operates 24/7/365 security monitoring tailored to West African financial institutions, and also helps in-house SOCs mature: detection use-case design, response playbooks, crisis exercises.
