MDR Providers, AI SOC Platforms, and SOC Partners, Oh My!

Key Differences Between MDR Providers, AI SOC Platforms, and SOC Partners in 2026

In today’s Cybersecurity marketplace, the same type of service goes by many different names and now has many different flavors for organizations to choose from. Lost within all this marketing jargon, clients of all sizes and industries are still in desperate need of a competent 24×7 partner to assist with cybersecurity threats as they do not have the internal people power to close this gap themselves.

How do you know where to focus your search in a world where so many tools, platforms, and providers seem to be solving the same problem and yet call it something different?

If you want a 24×7 partner to solve this problem today, you would probably first start with MDR services delivered by platform providers like Crowdstrike with their Falcon Complete solutions, or Palo Alto with their Unit 42 partnership, or even Arctic Wolf who leverages their own agent, which is the legacy EDR Cylance under the hood. As part of all their services they also have some kind of SOC to triage detections that originate from their tools.

For all these providers, their services are delivered by first leveraging the platform’s underlying endpoint-based solution. This endpoint-focused product can be paired with a separate Identity, XDR, or SIEM solution which typically helps cover any threat not detectable by endpoint protection. From there, a majority of these kinds of providers also use some form of built-in SOAR capabilities to respond to what is detected.

This means you must choose a tool first to then find the right provider. But what if you already have the right tools in place?

The problem of achieving 24×7 coverage can also be solved by some providers who are newer on the scene that have a heavy focus on Agentic AI. These are platforms that typically leverage an underlying, backend SIEM which either generates or ingests alerts from other tools that are then enriched by the Agentic AI the platform is built around.

These are called Agentic AI SOC platforms like Dropzone AI or Radiant Security. From a client experience perspective, your main point of contact is an AI assistant included within the AI SOC platform itself. But would you really feel safe knowing you are solely relying on a platform that is built on technology that has only been generally available for less than a decade?

This 24×7 problem can also be solved by more traditional SOC-as-a-Service providers. This is a people-focused solution that pairs expertise with an organization’s existing toolset to detect, triage, and respond to threats uncovered by those underlying security controls.

This way of solving the problem is typically more expensive and not necessarily something that most organizations are looking for. Why spend money just for someone else to throw people at your problem? If you are headed down that road already it might make more sense to justify to leadership that you need more people on your team, instead of hiring someone else’s. But does any organization have money to throw at people anymore?

So, if you are currently searching for a 24×7 partner, there are many disparate ways to solve your problem. At Proficio, we have been providing SOC and MDR services for over 15 years. And over that time, we continue to evolve ourselves to meet our clients where they are and meet their needs as they present themselves.

In this world of MDR providers, AI SOC platforms, and more traditional SOC-as-a-Service providers, where does Proficio fit in?

Proficio’s flagship offering, referred to as ProSOC MDR, is a marriage between all three of the otherwise disparate options outlined above.

ProSOC MDR does not limit an organization to any one endpoint, or EDR, solution. We can work with the platform you are currently invested in or move to a new tool with you regardless of the solution itself. Our internal teams have expertise in almost all industry leading EDR platforms.

Obviously, EDR is a necessary piece of any organization’s security program, but the environment is more than likely not just comprised of endpoints. There are identities, perimeter controls, cloud infrastructure, and serverless environments to consider. Agents do not assist with detecting and responding on these threat vectors, which is why Proficio’s ProSOC MDR is built to leverage the investments you have already made and bolster those with a centralized SIEM to gather data from places where installing an agent cannot solve the problem.

ProSOC MDR is not locked into one Hosted SIEM option either; clients can also bring a SIEM into the service if they have already invested in this type of tool (i.e. Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk, etc.). Proficio looks to support clients at all maturity levels as a SIEM-Agnostic MDR provider, and we can assist with filling that technology gap if you haven’t already.

And, unlike some of the other providers in the MDR space, we do not productize our support to detect and respond to threats outside of the purview of an agent. Complete visibility and response, especially more surgical response actions or containment workflows, are necessary parts of any 24×7 solution. We look to provide a complete solution out-of-the-box, instead of asking organizations to spend more money on an additional module to get what they were looking for in the first place. Clients shouldn’t have to pay extra for Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR)—it should be included as part of any core MDR service, and Proficio provides that.

In the case of AI, ProSOC MDR has AI built in. Some of the more recent platforms on the scene are built completely around their use of Agentic AI, which can create a single point of failure for any 24×7 security provider. At Proficio, we have built AI directly into our SOC workflows, but the analysts are still very much involved.

The use of Agentic AI is a requirement for all SOC teams in today’s world to keep up with the bad actors. So, instead of allowing analysts to individually jump into public platforms like ChatGPT or OpenAI with questions around an alert or critical situation, we have standardized prompts that pull everything an analyst would want to ask of an unmanaged AI platform and built that into enrichment on the front end of all our investigations, leveraging our own Agentic AI solution.

This has had a meaningful impact on our internal operations by allowing us to create autonomous response workflows and knocking dozens of minutes off our Mean-Time-To-Detect (MTTD) for all our clients. This is an important metric to keep low as AI-powered attacks can now have breakout times as fast as 10 minutes from initial access to a full-on breach.

But AI still has its own limitations. Everything reviewed by Proficio’s Agentic AI is validated by an analyst before clients see the alert to ensure there are no hallucinations or any degradation at all in the service we are delivering. These issues will inevitably pop up for any provider or platform that puts all their trust in a software-only solution and omits the people part of the process.

Achieving 24×7 coverage used to be a problem that could only be solved by adding headcount to your internal staff. This is no longer a sustainable method for modern executives trying to keep budgets tightly optimized, but it used to be the only path forward.

Tools can only go so far, and even with the feverish adoption of Agentic AI, this technology is still in its infancy and is more prone to mistakes than anyone wants to admit. People remain a necessary part of the solution. Proficio has maintained a global SOC presence for over a decade. The work our analysts and engineers do to keep our clients safe and continue to differentiate us from our competitors in this commoditized MDR world is critical.

ProSOC MDR is engineered to leverage Agentic AI workflows intelligently, assisting with the operational grunt work of an analyst, but for critical decision-making or nuanced threats, there is nothing better than an experienced and trusted human analyst in your corner.

Proficio continues to win industry awards and is perpetually featured in industry analysts’ recommended lists for MDR or SOC providers every year because of our ability to combine all these approaches into one complete service.

24×7 security is not just about the tools you have, it’s not just about throwing AI at the problem, and it’s no longer something you need to solely rely on people to solve. Proficio’s MDR service is built to take the best ideas from the currently crowded marketplace and give clients the right combination of what they have today, what AI can do to help, and a relied-upon human intervention to provide a 24×7 partnership our clients can trust.

Our goal moving into the future of MDR and SOC monitoring is to continue to expand on these initiatives and create a Glass Box SOC solution, instead of forcing clients to leverage a restrictive Black Box they simply have to hope they can trust.

By Joshua Thomason