Choosing between in-house and purchased threat detections
Security teams must decide which threat detections to create internally and which to obtain as prebuilt content. The article argues that a mixed approach is usually best: buy common coverage and build detections tailored to the organization. It recommends evaluating both options by time-to-coverage.
The article appears on SOC Prime’s blog, dated September 25, 2026, and is credited to Brandi Moore, the company’s Chief Revenue Officer. It frames detection engineering as a build-versus-buy choice and offers a worksheet covering inventory, annual build cost, annual buy cost, decision factors, and a final decision.
It also raises practical questions: what a detection engineer costs fully loaded, what a backlog costs, how small teams keep rules current, how to justify detection content spending to a board, and what gap exists between a technique’s publication and a deployed detection. The recommended metric is time-to-coverage.
Security teams, organizations, and their customers could be affected by how this build-versus-buy guidance is applied. A mixed approach may help under-resourced teams obtain common coverage faster while reserving internal effort for environment-specific threats. If time-to-coverage becomes a budgeting metric, spending and hiring priorities could shift, potentially improving detection speed and reducing blind spots. Vendors offering prebuilt detections may see greater demand, while detection engineers may focus more on customization and validation. The societal effect may be stronger operational resilience, though outcomes depend on implementation and context.