We are dealing with some pretty gifted cybercriminals these days. They seem more determined than ever to steal and sell sensitive data, whether it’s via the dark web or by slamming organizations with ransomware and distributed denial-of-service attacks.

There could be as many as 3.5 million cybersecurity job vacancies by 2021, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.

Nearly 70% of SMBs experienced a cyberattack last year, resulting in data breaches at some 58% of the companies surveyed, according to Ponemon Institute’s most recent study. Experts say small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) are becoming prime targets for online criminals, primarily because they lack the people, skills, tools and budgets of larger enterprises. These weaknesses present a prime target for malicious hackers to zero in on, resulting in catastrophic breaches that meant game over for 60% of SMBs that fell victim.

Unfortunately, the security professionals who have the skills to do the end-to-end stuff such as threat hunting, detection and forensics analysis don’t grow on trees. That’s bad news for SMBs who stand to suffer most from this perfect storm — a perilous threat landscape full of criminal hackers combined with a shortage of the necessary experts to protect these businesses from said criminal hackers.

Enter security operations center as a service (SOCaaS). According to some experts, the evolution of SOCaaS could be the answer for SMBs that find themselves increasingly under attack.

The lack of resources has spurred SMBs in the security industry to turn to SOC as a service to combat this wave of attacks through outsourcing. Services provided by companies like Arctic Wolf are enabling SMBs to build preventative defenses and detect cyberattacks more quickly, without having to find trained analysts in an industry that is currently experiencing its most significant skills shortage.

Sam McLane, chief technology services officer at Arctic Wolf, says SMBs struggle to up their cybersecurity game because they lack the resources and people that larger enterprises enjoy. This frequently leaves them scrambling for the people, processes and security technology that larger organizations use in-house, such as the security best practice of creating a security operations center (SOC).

Arctic Wolf’s Sam McLane

“Smaller enterprises continue to be an attractive target for bad guys, be it with targeted phishing or indiscriminate ransomware attacks,” says McLane. “But an on-premises SOC that includes a security information and event management (SIEM) system and analysts to monitor the environment is beyond the budget of most midsize enterprises. The market dynamic for these enterprises is to leverage services offered by the channel that don’t break the bank to monitor and detect threats.”

McLane goes on to say that managed detection and response offerings such as SOCaaS are changing the game for organizations that need to meet cybersecurity demands, but at a reasonable cost. Resource-constrained organizations that can’t locate and retain security talent are finding that SOCaaS allows them to improve security detection and response, meet their budget requirements, and sidestep the cybersecurity skills gap.