Fortinet Expands Managed SOC-as-a-Service: Accessible Cyber Defense for Every Organization

Meeting Organizations Where They Are

Today’s attack surface has expanded across cloud, remote work, and connected devices. And because adversaries take advantage of nights, weekends, and holidays to strike whenever and wherever defenses are weakest, around-the-clock monitoring and rapid response are no longer optional. They are essential, which is why every organization, regardless of size, must now seriously confront the need for a security operations center (SOC).

But building a SOC from scratch is beyond the reach of most organizations. A SOC requires advanced tooling, mature processes, and highly trained analysts, all of which are scarce and costly. Smaller organizations find the expense prohibitive, MSSPs struggle to scale quickly without major investments, and even large enterprises with dedicated SOCs face alert overload and specialized skills gaps.

In response to these challenges, Fortinet has developed FortiGuard SOC-as-a-Service (SOCaaS), a managed solution that delivers expert-led, AI-powered security operations tailored to meet organizations where they’re at in their security operations journey. Whether you’re a small IT shop seeking 24x7 coverage, a midsize business ready to expand your SecOps coverage, an enterprise filling critical expertise gaps, or a service provider building managed offerings, FortiGuard SOCaaS provides enterprise-grade protection without the overhead of having to build it yourself.

Expanded Integrations and AI-Driven Efficiencies

The latest release of FortiGuard SOCaaS introduces major advancements designed for today’s hybrid environments, spanning cloud-based portal views, broader detection coverage with Fortinet telemetry, and third-party monitoring. These enhancements reflect an acceleration in our release velocity, bringing more capability, more coverage, and deeper integration with every update.

• Expanded Fortinet telemetry support: The service now supports broader Fortinet product telemetry, including: FortiWeb Cloud for web application and API threat monitoring, FortiAppSec to enhance cloud-native and web-facing workload protection, and FortiEndpoint for endpoint incident detection, including integrated escalation with managed FortiClient and MDR teams.
• Attack surface management: When combined with SOCaaS, FortiRecon further enriches this ecosystem with external risk intelligence, providing visibility into exposed credentials, brand impersonation, misconfigured public assets, and leaked data that attackers could exploit, helping organizations continuously monitor and manage their attack surfaces.
• Third-party monitoring: Support for key third-party detection sources, including Microsoft Defender and more, extend security monitoring coverage into mixed environments, enabling organizations to unify visibility without the need to rip-and-replace existing tools.
• Cloud-based portal: The SOCaaS portal continues to evolve as the IT team’s single pane of visibility into Fortinet’s 24x7 managed SOC service. It includes access to escalated alerts, contextual incident details, forensic requests, and expert guidance. The portal introduces a powerful new SOC Monitoring Use Cases dashboard for both IT and OT environments. This view maps threat activity to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, providing detailed insight into how Fortinet’s SOC detects and escalates threats at every stage of the kill chain.

Together, these advancements deliver a unified SOC service that seamlessly covers both on-premises and cloud workloads.

At the core of this managed service is Fortinet’s industry-recognized AI-driven SOC technologies. Fortinet’s global analyst team leverages advanced AI and automation technologies to process millions of daily events, cutting through the noise of events to surface the most critical alerts.  Organizations immediately benefit from faster triage, fewer false positives, and clear, actionable guidance. In many cases, significant threats are identified and escalated within 15 minutes, with full context on what happened, why it matters, and how to respond.

Use Cases Across the Security Maturity Spectrum

FortiGuard SOCaaS is designed to scale to fit your needs, whether you are just beginning your SOC journey or optimizing a mature operation, and seamlessly scale as your organization grows.

• Smaller entities starting a SOC
  Small IT teams cannot realistically staff a 24x7 SOC. SOCaaS bridges this gap immediately, delivering continuous monitoring without the need for new hires, training, or infrastructure costs.
• Midsize entities expanding services
  Teams with limited security staff often face alert fatigue. SOCaaS offloads triage and provides a prioritized view of genuine threats, enabling your staff to focus on investigations, policy refinement, and compliance initiatives.
• Enterprise entities filling critical skills gaps
  Even enterprise SOCs struggle to cover areas such as 24x7 monitoring, rapid malware analysis, and proactive threat hunting. SOCaaS supplements your existing teams with Fortinet expertise and AI-driven processes to accelerate investigations and close critical gaps.
• MSSPs building or expanding managed services
  MSSPs can resell, OEM, or integrate SOC capabilities into their portfolios without heavy upfront investments. This model accelerates time-to-market, increases customer loyalty, and optimizes operations.

Real-World Impact

Murata Machinery USA lacked the staff to monitor alerts after hours. By enabling FortiGuard SOCaaS, they extended threat monitoring across evenings, weekends, and holidays. The results were faster response times, fewer false positives, and a significantly reduced analyst workload, saving Murata 30 hours of manual review time each month without requiring additional resource investment.

This use case demonstrates the core value of SOCaaS: meeting organizations where they are today while paving the way toward greater SOC maturity tomorrow. Organizations can start small, realize immediate benefits, and expand over time all without disrupting existing operations.

Why Fortinet

While SOCaaS is not new, Fortinet’s unique approach stands apart. Many vendors bolt on outsourced SOC services to generic tools, but FortiGuard SOCaaS is built natively into the Fortinet Security Fabric, ensuring tighter integration, faster results, and a lower cost of ownership.

Key advantages include:

• Expert-led operations powered by one of the world’s largest threat operations networks. Fortinet combines nearly 1,000 FortiGuard Labs researchers, global SOC analysts, and hundreds of threat intelligence partners, feeding back best practices and innovations that benefit every customer.
• AI-enhanced triage reduces false positives and speeds analysis and response.
• Alignment with FortiSASE creates unified protection across remote, cloud, and on-premises environments.
• Maximized ROI enables organizations to extend their Fortinet investments without building a SOC.
• Fast time to value through quick-start deployments with simple licensing and automated onboarding. Go live in days, not months, cut false positives by up to 85% and achieve response times as fast as 15 minutes.
• Predictable cost and clear value as FortiGuard SOCaaS delivers 24x7 enterprise-grade protection without the cost of building a SOC in-house. Flexible licensing, bundled SASE integration, and seamless platform alignment make it an investment that scales.

For organizations already invested in Fortinet, SOCaaS is a natural extension of their security architectures.

A Platform for Growth

Cybersecurity is a dynamic challenge. Today’s threats are rapidly evolving, and your defenses must keep pace. FortiGuard SOCaaS is much more than a safety net. It is a platform for continuous growth. Organizations can begin offloading the monitoring and triage of their FortiGate or FortiSASE deployment, then expand their security operations coverage with FortiEndpoint endpoint protection and more all through the same service relationship.

For MSSPs, this flexibility supports the packaging of differentiated offerings to meet customer needs today while laying the groundwork for tomorrow. And for enterprises, it eliminates the trade-off between comprehensive coverage and operational complexity.

A Smarter Path Forward

While building a SOC may be appropriate for some organizations, it can be impractical for others. And now, for many, it is also unnecessary. FortiGuard SOCaaS delivers the expertise, efficiency, and scalability needed to achieve enterprise-grade security operations without building them in-house.

FortiGuard SOCaaS makes SOC capabilities accessible to every organization regardless of size, maturity, or industry.