"Do we need a SOC?" is the right question asked the wrong way. You almost certainly need what a SOC does — someone watching your alerts around the clock and acting on them. Whether you build that yourself is a math problem, and the math rarely favors building.
What a SOC actually is
Strip away the acronym and a security operations center is three things: telemetry (detection on your endpoints, identity, and email), humans watching it 24/7, and a defined response when something fires. Attacks don't keep business hours — a Sunday-2am ransomware kickoff is the classic — so "24/7" is the part that breaks small budgets.
The in-house math
True around-the-clock coverage needs roughly five to six trained analysts to staff the shifts, plus the tooling and the management overhead. For a 50-person company, that's a security team larger than most of your departments, for a capability you hope never triggers.
The question isn't "SOC or no SOC." It's "our SOC or a shared one."
The managed alternative
A managed SOC / MDR gives you the same three things — telemetry, 24/7 humans, defined response — as a shared service, at a fraction of the standalone cost, because the analysts and tooling are amortized across many clients. For most businesses under a few hundred people, that's the answer that's both affordable and actually staffed. See how our managed security works.