A Threat-Led Approach: How to Choose What Your SOC Should Monitor

Welcome to the golden age of log overload.

Your Security Operations Centre (SOC) is probably drowning in logs from SaaS tools, cloud workloads, hybrid infrastructures and more security point solutions than you can shake a stick at. And yet, somehow, attackers still slip through.

Let’s be honest – if your SOC team looks like it’s just stepped out of a hostage situation every Monday morning, your 24/7 cyber security monitoring strategy might need a rethink.

This article isn’t going to tell you what you already know. We’re skipping the surface-level talk and diving straight into the real stuff: how a threat-led approach helps you zero in on what needs monitoring. Let’s get surgical.

🧐 Why 24/7 Cyber Security Monitoring Needs a Rethink

The traditional mantra was “log everything.” But that just doesn’t cut it anymore – not in an age where:

• Most UK SMBs run 10+ security tools simultaneously
• Analysts waste up to 30% of their time on false positives (Verizon DBIR 2024)
• The IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, 2024, reveals attackers are exploiting misconfigured or under-monitored assets in over 60% of SMB breaches

🎯 What is a Threat-Led Approach?

The term “Threat-led” gets thrown around an awful lot and for good reason.  When an organisation gets it right, it changes everything.

Here’s what it  means:

• Step 1: Identify Your Top Cyber Threats – Based on industry, infrastructure, attack history and adversary tactics
• Step 2: Map Threats to Techniques – Use MITRE ATT&CK to translate attacker behaviours into detection opportunities
• Step 3: Link to Data Sources – Identify which logs give you the best visibility for each relevant technique

This approach flips the equation. You don’t start with what’s available – you start with what’s valuable.

Tools like the MITRE ATT&CK Navigator and CyPro’s internal threat-led mapping methodology can help visualise this process for your organisation.

With ATT&CK Navigator, you can map attacker techniques in an interactive grid, overlay threat intelligence and colour-code detection coverage. This makes it easy to see where you’re strong, where you’re exposed and how attacker behaviours link to real-world threats targeting your industry.

Pairing this with CyPro’s internal methodology adds crucial context by overlaying known organisational mitigations and current log coverage, which gives a much clearer picture of your actual defensive posture. This exposes the gaps between known threats, existing controls and telemetry whilst helping you prioritise exactly which techniques to focus detection efforts on.

🌅 Visibility ≠ Coverage: Evaluating Your Current Monitoring Landscape

Just because you’ve got logs coming in doesn’t mean you’ve got coverage.

Common gaps include:

• Cloud platform logs (e.g. AWS CloudTrail)
• SaaS platform APIs (e.g. M365, Google Workspace, Salesforce)
• CI/CD pipelines & container logs
• Endpoint blind spots from BYOD or third-party devices

These are increasingly critical areas – especially as more organisations, particularly SMBs, shift to SaaS-first tech stacks in the wake of the AI tooling boom – but visibility here remains limited at best.

🤏 Why do these gaps persist?

1. Low Detection Coverage Out of the Box

Many of these data sources – especially SaaS APIs and cloud-native services – don’t come with strong default detections. They’re relatively new from a logging perspective and need custom use case mapping and detection engineering to be truly useful.

Ingesting logs from Salesforce or Notion might tell you when a document is accessed or an admin role is changed, but without defined threat models or alert logic, these events often get logged and forgotten.

2. Assumed Coverage via SSO or CASBs

It’s common for teams to assume they’re covered because a SaaS app is behind Okta or monitored by a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB). But these tools mostly focus on login events, not internal activity. Key signals like:

• Changes to sharing permissions
• Abnormal access to sensitive content
• Privileged user behaviour

…are rarely visible unless you go looking for them.

3. Visibility Doesn’t Equal Context

Even when logs are technically collected, they’re often dumped into the SIEM with no alert logic, no tuning and no alignment with attacker behaviours. The logs exist – but no one’s looking at them properly.

Use the CIS Controls v8 and NIST 800-53 as benchmarks – or ask us about our Log Value Matrix, a structured way to assess and prioritise log sources based on security value, not just availability.

🤯 How to Choose the Logs That Matter

Logs that don’t support detection or investigation should prompt a second thought- are they worth the storage cost?

A threat-led approach helps you:

• Prioritise high-value logs (like endpoint telemetry, identity logs, DNS activity)
• Deprioritise noisy or redundant logs
• Make peace with not logging everything!

📊 SOC Log Value Matrix: Prioritising Detection Coverage with Efficiency

Log Source	Detection Value	Storage Cost	Ease of Ingestion	Overall Priority
EDR (e.g. SentinelOne)	High	Medium	Native API / Agent-based	High
Windows Event Logs	Medium	High	Native but noisy	Medium
CloudTrail / GCP Logs	High	Medium	Requires cloud connector	High
Network Flow	Low	High	Complex / custom parsing	Low

What the Log Value Matrix gives us is the understanding that not all telemetry is equal. Logs should be evaluated based on their real contribution to threat detection, their resource burden and their ease of integration. A structured log assessment model brings objectivity to what is often a highly subjective – and costly – process.

This isn’t about cutting corners – it’s about being smart with your resources. It allows you to reduce ingestion costs and analyst fatigue, without sacrificing threat coverage.

📈 The (Massive) Perks of a Threat-Led SOC

Now for the good bit – what your organisation stands to gain from this approach.

Adopting a threat-led SOC strategy doesn’t just mean you spot more attacks – it transforms how your team works, how fast you respond, and how confidently you can report to leadership.

Here’s what you unlock:

• Cost Efficiency – Less unnecessary data means lower storage bills, fewer ingestion costs and more predictable licensing
• Improved Analyst Focus – Analysts aren’t wading through white noise; they’re investigating real threats mapped to known TTPs
• Reduced Fatigue & Burnout – Alert volumes drop, false positives shrink and the team gets more time to focus on what matters
• Faster Incident Response – With better visibility and clearer context, mean time to detect and respond drops significantly
• Boardroom Confidence – Reporting is cleaner, risk metrics are more aligned to actual threats and leadership trust in security improves

❌ Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

Even with the best intentions, it’s easy to stumble. Here are some of the common traps I’ve seen organisations fall into – and how to sidestep them.

1. Over-indexing on Compliance Logs

Logging for the sake of ISO audits is fine – until it overwhelms your SIEM and distracts your analysts. Compliance and detection should work together, not compete for the same air.

2. Neglecting SaaS and Cloud

Most breaches now involve cloud and SaaS systems, yet many organisations still treat them as secondary. These platforms must be core to your detection strategy.

3. Thinking Threat = SIEM Config

Creating a detection rule is the last step, not the first. Real detection engineering starts with threat modelling, not regex.

4. Failing to Iterate

Threats evolve. So should your 24/7 cyber security monitoring. A threat-led strategy isn’t “set and forget” – it’s a continuous improvement mindset.

Ultimately, a proper threat-led strategy generates and acts on insights tailored to your organisation. It may take more effort upfront, but in my experience, it will absolutely save time, money and stress in the long run.

✅ A Good SOC Should Be Threat-Led by Design

Today, a high-performing SOC isn’t defined by how many alerts it processes—it’s defined by how well it understands which threats matter and whether it’s watching the right signals.

The best security operations teams:

• Map threat activity using frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to understand likely attacker behaviour
• Build detections that align with real-world techniques, not generic rules
• Prioritise log sources that provide depth and relevance — not just volume
• Continuously hunt for emerging threats based on current threat intel
• Triage smarter, reducing alert fatigue and sharpening response

At CyPro, our 24/7 Cyber Security Monitoring and Managed Detection & Response services are built around these principles. We bring structure, clarity and ongoing threat alignment to every monitoring engagement – and ensure your SOC always stays ahead of what’s next.

🫵 Two Main Approaches to Log Collection: Choosing What Works for You

Now, before we wrap up, there’s one more thing worth covering, because it often catches people off guard when discussing SOC strategy.

There are two main schools of thought regarding how organisations collect and store security logs. Neither is inherently right or wrong, but they suit different business needs and levels of SOC maturity.

Approach A: “Selective Collection” – Only What’s Important

The more traditional method. You send only priority logs to your SIEM or MDR platform – think authentication events, endpoint telemetry, and cloud admin activity. The aim is to focus on high-signal data that supports detection, without drowning in noise (or sky-high SIEM costs).

Why it works:

• It keeps ingestion costs down (important when vendors charge per GB)
• Your analysts can run faster searches and more meaningful alerts
• It’s simpler to manage day-to-day

The Drawbacks:

There are some trade-offs with a ‘selective collection’ method.

• You may miss useful forensic evidence in future incidents
• It also needs constant tuning as your tech stack evolves
• You’ll likely need a secondary archive regardless if you’ve regulatory requirements (like PCI DSS or GDPR)

Approach B: The Security Data Lake – Collect Everything, Analyse on Demand

This emerging model collects everything – raw telemetry from across your business – into a scalable data lake.

You store logs cheaply, and analysts run searches or threat hunts on demand.

Why it works:

• You get a complete forensic timeline – no more “do we have that log?” moments
• It’s flexible. You can apply new analytics or threat models to old data
• It enables cross-domain visibility (e.g. linking IT, security and business data to spot patterns)

The Drawbacks:

• More engineering complexity (pipelines, partitioning, query tuning), which can be an issue for less mature SOCs without the manpower to keep up with these tasks.
• Hidden costs in processing and building adequate architectural requirements.

So, what works best?

In my experience, most will adopt a hybrid model:

• Hot path: Priority security logs go into your real-time detection stack
• Cold path: All raw logs are mirrored into affordable cloud storage, ready for threat hunting or compliance needs

And here’s the trick – don’t set it and forget it. Revisit this split between hot and cold every quarter, as your risks, tools and costs evolve.

For most growing businesses, hybrid wins: you get the correct data for real-time defence and the complete data when you need to investigate or meet compliance requirements.

Remember – whichever path you choose should be guided by your threat model, not just your tech stack or what your SIEM vendor tells you. That’s how you stay sharp, efficient and in control. 😁

🚀 Conclusion

The days of “log it all and hope for the best” are over.

Your SOC doesn’t need more data. It needs better data – data aligned to actual threats.

By adopting a threat-led approach to 24/7 cyber security monitoring, you:

• Become more cost efficient
• Improve threat detection in Real Time
• Make your SOC team slightly less grumpy 😄

Ready to modernise your monitoring strategy?

👉 Talk to CyPro’s SOC experts to get started.