Most organizations don’t fail at security because they lack tools, they fail because they can’t sustain attention at 2:00 AM. The hard part is not collecting logs; it’s sustaining focus when people are tired, signals are noisy, and the business still expects fast, safe decisions.

soc

“24/7 monitoring” is not a promise that a human is staring at dashboards all night. It is a promise that the business will detect, triage, and respond within an agreed time window, even when the security team is asleep. Done well, it feels boring: a few alerts, clear context, and predictable actions. Done poorly, it feels like chaos.

If you run a small security team and shift work is unrealistic, this article is a blueprint for building a system that behaves like a larger SOC without burning people out. You’ll see how to reduce noise, map alerts to real risks, automate safely, and design escalation paths that only wake humans when it truly matters. The goal is simple: reliable response at night, sustainable security by day.

Reframe “24/7” into outcomes

Start by translating 24/7 monitoring into measurable outcomes: detection coverage, time-to-triage, time-to-containment, and clarity of ownership. A clean way to anchor that conversation is the NIST Cybersecurity Framework functions, because they help you explain to non-security stakeholders why “Detect” without “Respond” is just expensive anxiety.

Detect Triage Contain Recover

Then make it explicit: what events deserve waking someone up, and what can wait until morning. Most small teams burn out because everything becomes “urgent” and the pager eventually gets ignored.

Define three practical categories:

  • Critical: Active compromise likely, material impact possible, needs action now.
  • High: Strong signal of attack or policy breach, action within a few hours.
  • Routine: Valuable context and hygiene tasks, handled in business hours.

This is not bureaucracy. It is how you protect your team’s attention, which is the scarcest resource you have.

Build a minimum viable detection pipeline

A small team cannot do “collect everything” and “investigate everything.” You need a pipeline that is boring, predictable, and easy to maintain.

  1. Standardize your language for attacks
    If your detections are not mapped to common adversary behaviors, you will argue endlessly about priorities. Use the MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Matrix as a shared map of tactics and techniques, then choose a handful that match your real risks (identity compromise, lateral movement, ransomware precursors, data exfiltration).

  2. Decide what telemetry is non-negotiable
    For most companies, the “good enough” baseline is:

    • Identity logs (SSO, MFA, conditional access, admin actions).
    • Endpoint telemetry (process, network connections, privilege changes).
    • Core network visibility (DNS, proxy, firewall, VPN).
    • Cloud control plane logs (IAM, storage access, audit trails).
    • Backup and recovery signals (because attackers love to disable them).

    If you are cloud-heavy and microservice-heavy, treat observability as security fuel: the OpenTelemetry ecosystem is built around collecting traces, metrics, and logs, and those signals can be powerful for detecting abuse patterns, not just outages.

  3. Use “detection as code” to avoid tribal knowledge
    Rules should live in version control, with peer review, tests, and release notes. A pragmatic entry point is the Sigma rule format, which aims to be a generic signature format for SIEMs and gives you a huge set of community detections you can adapt.

  4. Pick a SIEM approach that matches your staffing model
    This is less about features and more about operations. Your SIEM must support:

    • Reliable ingestion and parsing for your key log sources.
    • Fast querying during an incident (no “wait 20 minutes for a search job”).
    • Simple alert tuning workflows.
    • Role-based access and auditability.

    If your team is tiny, avoid the trap of deploying something impressive that requires a full-time engineer to keep it alive.

Make alerts fewer, sharper, and actionable

“24/7 monitoring” collapses under alert fatigue. The secret is not more alerts, it is fewer alerts with better context.

A practical tuning strategy:

  • Start from high-confidence behaviors (new admin creation, MFA disabled, endpoint credential dumping indicators, unusual OAuth consent grants).
  • Require context before paging: asset criticality, user role, geo-velocity, known maintenance windows.
  • Set explicit quality targets, for example “critical alerts should be under five per week, and at least half should lead to a meaningful action.”

Also, invest in correlation. A single event rarely proves compromise; a chain often does. Example: “impossible travel” plus “new device registration” plus “token replay pattern” is very different from one odd login.

Automate response, but keep it safe

Automation is what turns a small team into a 24/7-capable team. But only if you automate the right things, and only if you can undo mistakes.

Level 1: Enrich Level 2: Contain Level 3: Eradicate

Use a “safe automation ladder”:

  • Level 1: Enrich (whois, asset owner, recent logins, related alerts).
  • Level 2: Contain with reversible steps (disable user session tokens, isolate endpoint, block hash).
  • Level 3: Eradicate (remove persistence, rotate credentials, patch) only after human confirmation.

This is where incident workflow matters. A platform like TheHive is designed as a collaborative case management system for incident response, which helps you turn chaotic alerts into trackable cases with tasks, evidence, and approvals.

A concrete “3 AM” runbook example

Scenario: Your SIEM triggers an alert for a privileged user logging in from a new country, followed by mailbox rule creation and a suspicious OAuth grant.

Your playbook can do the following automatically:

  • Enrich: pull recent successful logins, device info, and the user’s admin roles.
  • Validate: check if the user is traveling (HR calendar flag, ticket, or VPN location).
  • Contain: force sign-out and revoke refresh tokens if risk is high.
  • Notify: open an incident, assign it, and page on-call only if containment happened or if high-value assets were accessed.

The human who wakes up should see a clear story, not a pile of raw events.

Use frameworks to keep scope realistic

Frameworks are useful when they prevent you from boiling the ocean.

  • If you want a prioritized, small-team-friendly control set, use the CIS Critical Security Controls v8 as a menu of “what matters most” and align monitoring use cases to the controls you actually implement.
  • If you want a practical incident handling structure (roles, procedures, communication), lean on the NIST SP 800-61 Rev. 3 Incident Handling Guide, especially when you define escalation paths and what information must be captured during triage.

The key is not to “comply with a framework.” The key is to use a framework to defend your time and simplify decisions.

Get 24/7 coverage with smart staffing patterns

Even with great automation, some events require a human quickly. If you cannot run shifts, you still have options that do not destroy your team.

  1. On-call rotation, but only for true criticals
    The on-call person should get few pages, with high signal. If you page for noise, the rotation will collapse within months. Make sure your critical alerts have clear, pre-approved actions.

  2. Follow-the-sun by partnership
    If you have multiple offices or trusted partners in different time zones, you can split triage duties without formal shift work. The trick is documentation and consistent playbooks, not heroics.

  3. MDR or SOC-as-a-Service for first-line triage
    A managed provider can cover the “eyes on glass” function and escalate only validated incidents. This can be a force multiplier if you define boundaries: what they can contain automatically, what they must ask approval for, and what evidence they must attach to every escalation.

  4. Cross-train IT operations for the first 30 minutes
    In small orgs, IT is often the only team awake. Give them a simple, safe checklist: isolate host, disable account, preserve evidence, notify security. This is not turning IT into a SOC, it is buying you time.

On-call health: rotation design and real rest

For small teams, on-call is not just a scheduling problem, it is a fatigue problem. If you want 24/7 capability without burning people out, you must design for recovery and limit the cognitive load. A solid, widely cited reference on on-call sustainability is the Google SRE book, which frames on-call as a reliability function that must be engineered, not improvised.

Key practices that work for small teams:

  • Keep the rotation lightweight: avoid having the same person cover back-to-back weeks. If your team is tiny, shorten the on-call window (for example, weekday nights only) and cover weekends with an external provider or shared IT coverage.
  • Define hard paging rules: only page for Critical events. If it is not critical, it becomes next-business-day work. This protects sleep and makes pages meaningful.
  • Build a rest policy into the process: if someone is paged at night, allow a late start or a reduced workload the next day. It sounds simple, but it is the single most effective anti-burnout rule.
  • Use “first-30-minutes” playbooks: the on-call analyst should have a safe, short checklist that stabilizes the situation (contain, preserve evidence, notify). Deep investigation waits for business hours.
  • Measure load, not just coverage: track pages per week, median time-to-contain, and after-hours hours lost. If the load trends up, tune detections before expanding the rotation.
  • Create an escalation buddy: for high-stress incidents, the on-call person should be able to pull in a second responder without social friction. That’s how you prevent single-person heroics.

Small teams succeed when on-call is predictable, rare, and recoverable. Treat rest as an operational requirement, not a perk, and your 24/7 system will stay reliable.

Add AI carefully, where it actually helps

AI is useful in SecOps when it reduces cognitive load and shortens time-to-answer, not when it replaces verification.

High-value AI use cases for small teams:

  • Triage summarization: turn 200 log lines into a short narrative with key artifacts.
  • Query generation: convert “hunt for suspicious PowerShell download cradle” into a SIEM query template.
  • Case enrichment: extract entities (IPs, users, hashes), link related alerts, propose next steps.

One example of a security-focused assistant is Microsoft Security Copilot, positioned as an AI copilot to help security professionals analyze threats and respond faster by integrating security data and tools.

Two rules keep AI from becoming a risk:

  • Never let AI be the only reason you contain or eradicate. Use it to accelerate, then confirm with evidence.
  • Treat prompts and outputs as sensitive. Avoid pasting secrets, full customer data, or proprietary incident details into tools without clear governance.

A realistic “small-team” blueprint

If you want a concrete target architecture for 24/7 capability without shifts, aim for:

Endpoint + Identity SIEM + Correlation Case Mgmt SOAR Automation Escalation Model Optional MDR Reliable 24/7 outcomes
  • Endpoint + identity telemetry as your primary detection layer.
  • A SIEM that supports correlation and fast investigation. Consider Wazuh for open source XDR/SIEM capabilities.
  • Case management with disciplined playbooks.
  • SOAR-style automation for enrichment and reversible containment.
  • An escalation model that pages humans rarely, but with high confidence.
  • Optional MDR for first-line triage if your risk warrants it.

A small team can absolutely deliver 24/7 monitoring, but only if the system does most of the work. Your job is to design that system so it is reliable at noon and at night, and so your people can stay sharp for the incidents that truly matter.