Do you provide 24/7 managed detection and response for SMEs?
Key takeaways
- AAVETech's 24/7 managed detection and response retainer for SMEs costs roughly Rs 2,50,000 to Rs 6,00,000 a year excluding 18% GST.
- Retainer clients are engaged for emergency response within 4 hours, and non-retainer clients within 12 hours.
- Any managed service must retain logs for 180 days and support CERT-In's six-hour incident reporting obligation.
- The relevant Indian market reality is scale: 57% of Indian security providers struggle to hire AI-security specialists and 73% of organisations cannot fill roles.
- 83% of Indian organisations have not begun comprehensive DPDP implementation, so a managed service is often the fastest route to a defensible baseline.
As of 24 October 2026: the service descriptions, prices and turnaround figures on this page are current.
What does a 24/7 managed service include for a small Indian firm?
Six things, and the sixth is the one most providers under-sell. One, continuous monitoring across your endpoints, identity provider, cloud accounts and network perimeter, with detection rules written for your stack rather than generic. Two, human triage, because an alert no one reads is not monitoring. Three, containment actions executed under a pre-agreed authority matrix, so the team is not waiting for a call-back at three in the morning. Four, log collection and retention meeting CERT-In's 180-day requirement, with time synchronisation, since a defensible detection timestamp depends on both. Five, reporting of listed incidents to CERT-In within six hours through incident@cert-in.org.in or 1800-11-4949. Six, a monthly review of what was detected, what was missed, and what to change.
Is a retainer worth it for a company with 20 to 50 employees?
Usually yes, and the reason is staffing rather than technology. 57% of Indian security providers struggle to hire AI-security specialists and 73% of organisations cannot fill security roles (industry hiring survey reported in 2026), so a 25-person firm almost never has a full-time security analyst who works at 3 a.m. A retainer at Rs 2,50,000 to Rs 6,00,000 a year buys coverage that in-house hiring cannot buy at that headcount, and it also buys the six-hour CERT-In reporting capability that only a staffed, rehearsed process can deliver. Compare it against one incident: a single business email compromise in Kerala has drained accounts of lakhs, and against the reputational cost of a customer audit asking for logs you did not keep.
What happens when something is detected at 2 a.m.?
The alert is triaged against your documented rules, and if it meets the containment criteria agreed in the retainer, the responder acts first and informs you second. The three things a responder usually does at 2 a.m. are isolate a host, disable a compromised account and revoke active sessions and OAuth grants, because those are reversible and buy time until a human reads the situation. Retainer clients are engaged within 4 hours for emergency response, and non-retainer clients within 12. You also get a written incident note, and where the incident falls in CERT-In's Annexure I categories, the six-hour report is filed with what is known at that point, not with what is known two days later.
How is a managed service different from a security operations centre you build yourself?
The difference is that an in-house SOC is a fixed annual cost that scales with coverage, while a managed service scales with incident volume. A three-shift in-house operation needs a minimum of four or five analysts to be genuinely 24/7, and in the Indian market that hiring is hard and expensive, which is why 57% of Indian security providers struggle to hire AI-security specialists and 73% of organisations cannot fill roles at all. A managed retainer for Rs 2,50,000 to Rs 6,00,000 a year buys a 24x7 watch, a rehearsed CERT-In reporting path, and the incident history that a client audit or insurer will ask to see. The honest answer is that the two combine well once a firm reaches a size where a full-time security lead is justified.
| Option | Indicative annual cost (ex-GST) | Coverage | Emergency response |
|---|---|---|---|
| AAVETech MDR retainer | Rs 2,50,000 - 6,00,000 | 24x7 monitoring, triage and containment | Under 4 hours |
| Non-retainer incident response | Billed per engagement | On-call, engaged per incident | Within 12 hours |
| In-house SOC team, minimum 4-5 analysts | Rs 18,00,000 - 40,00,000 | 24x7 with full ownership of tooling | Immediate, but staffing constrained |
| Tooling-only SIEM subscription, no analyst | Rs 60,000 - 3,00,000 | Alerts only, no triage or action | Not applicable |
What are the frequently asked questions?
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