If you run a business in India, there’s a good chance your WhatsApp group has had at least one “urgent security alert” message in the past year. Maybe a supplier’s system got hacked. Maybe one of your vendors suddenly went offline. Maybe your own staff reported strange login attempts at 2:30 AM.
This has quietly become the new normal.
And 2025 is expected to be even worse—not because Indian companies are careless, but because attackers have realised something that many businesses still haven’t fully accepted:
Indian organisations don’t have someone watching their systems at night.
You can see this pattern in almost every major cyber incident that hit the news last year. The most talked-about example was the AIIMS attack in Delhi, which knocked systems offline for weeks and compromised millions of records. It happened because attackers had free, unmonitored time inside the network.
There’s a reason incidents like these are increasing: most Indian companies still treat cybersecurity as a daytime job, even though the threats operate 24 hours a day.
That gap—those unmonitored hours—is exactly what cybercriminals exploit.
Why Attacks Spike at Night (It’s Not a Coincidence)
Speak to anyone running a 24/7 Security Operations Center, and they’ll tell you the same thing:
Most serious alerts come between late evening and early morning.
Not because attackers are nocturnal geniuses…
but because that’s when Indian businesses are blind.
Researchers from IBM’s X-Force team published similar observations, showing that ransomware groups prefer weekends or evenings because defenders take longer to react.
A delay of even one hour can make the difference between a small incident and a full-blown operational shutdown.
What a 24 7 Cyber Security Service Actually Does (Not the Marketing Version)
Let’s get practical. A 24/7 SOC isn’t a room full of blinking monitors the way movies show it.
It’s more like an emergency ward for your IT environment.
A real SOC team:
- spots suspicious behaviour (strange logins, unusual file access, rogue scripts)
- investigates it immediately
- blocks it before it spreads
- calls you ONLY when something genuinely matters
And unlike internal IT teams, SOC analysts don’t need to “arrive at the office” before reacting. They’re already there—watching your systems in real time.
Most Indian SMEs who switched to a 24/7 model did so after a rude wake-up call: someone found out too late that something had been brewing inside the network for days.
The Mumbai Payment Gateway Attack
One incident that stuck with me was a story reported by The Economic Times last year about a Mumbai-based payment gateway provider that faced repeated credential-stuffing attacks late at night—thousands of login attempts within minutes.
Their internal team only realised something serious was happening the next morning.
By then, several customer accounts had already been compromised.
After they moved to a 24/7 SOC, this type of attack became a non-event. Analysts spotted and blocked the unusual behaviour in minutes.
This is the difference between “having security tools” and “having someone awake to use them.”
Why Continuous Monitoring Is Now Mandatory in India
There are three major reasons businesses are no longer getting away with reactive security:
- India’s DPDP Act
The fines are no joke. Up to ₹250 crore for negligence. This alone has made C-suite leaders rethink their “we’re too small for hackers to care” stance.
- Cloud and Remote Work Expanded the Attack Surface
It’s not just the office network anymore.
Your staff log in from homes, cafés, airports, hotels—and attackers know it.
- Ransomware Is Hitting Everyone
From manufacturing units in Pune to hospitals in Bangalore, ransomware stories aren’t rare anymore. Scroll through The Hindu’s cybercrime section and you’ll find a new one almost every week.
FAQs
- What is a 24/7 Security Operations Center and how does it protect my business?
It’s a team that monitors your systems around the clock, identifies suspicious activity instantly, and stops attacks before they escalate.
- Why is continuous monitoring essential for modern cyber threats?
Because attackers automate everything. Bots don’t care if it’s 4 PM or 4 AM—they run nonstop, scanning for weaknesses.
- How does a 24/7 cybersecurity service differ from traditional IT security?
Traditional IT is reactive and usually works office hours.
A 24/7 service is proactive, with real-time detection and immediate response.
