What is Managed Detection and Response (MDR)?

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) vendors provide services to companies and organizations that aim to improve how they detect threats, respond to incidents, and continuously monitor their IT assets.

What is Managed Detection and Response (MDR)?

Managed detection and response (MDR) services offer more comprehensive threat detection and response capabilities by augmenting cyber security tools with human support. MDR integrates, synthesizes, and contextualizes security and other event information to hunt for, understand, and respond to security incidents. MDR is critical for containing and resolving future attacks.

How Does MDR Work?

Managed Detection and Response works by integrating a security platform with analytics and expert-led services to provide threat detection and response recommendations across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments and endpoints. It does this by identifying all assets, profiling their risks, and then collecting activity information from logs, events, networks, endpoints, and user behavior. Threats and vulnerabilities are researched in the wild and are codified to be quickly recognized when seen by the MDR provider so that MDR analysts can take over to validate incidents, 24/7, escalating critical events and providing recommended response actions so that threats can be remediated.

Benefits of Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

In the face of seemingly overwhelming security threats and campaigns, organizations are also coping with increasing security budgets and a challenging security job market leans on skilled security analysts. Gaining more protection, insight, and compliance without adding more tools and people is a goal that enterprises of all sizes seek. MDR can provide beneficial security services capable of meeting and sustaining an organization’s goals:

• 24/7 monitoring and improved communications mechanisms with experienced SOC analysts
• Experienced security analysts oversee your organization’s defenses without adding full-time staff and resources
• Complete managed endpoint threat detection and response service
• Improved threat detection and extended detection coverage
• Expert investigation of alerts and incidents, and subsequent actions
• Proactive threat hunting
• Improved threat intelligence based on indicators and behaviors captured from global insights
• Improved threat response
• Decreased breach response
• Improved forensics and higher-level investigations
• Vulnerability management
• Major incident response and log management
• Remove the burden of day-to-day security management from your staff and budget
• Maintain access and customization to your organization’s security defenses
• Improved compliance and reporting
• Reduced security investment, increased ROI

What challenges can MDR address?

Resource and internal security staffing limitations

The ratio of IT staff to the total number of employees varies depending on the organization’s size and annual revenue. While medium and large organizations may be able to afford full-time security teams dedicated to threat hunting, response, and remediation, individual experience varies with obscure skill levels and acumen. For small businesses, hiring a team of such caliber is outside the realm of possibility. MDR security presents a unique opportunity for large and small businesses alike to leverage budget-friendly, high-skilled cyberthreat expertise.

High alert volume

Glaring issues that IT personnel face include an overwhelming volume of alerts and notifications set off by traditional security tools. Seemingly pinging with equal levels of urgency, the magnitude of false positive activity can leave internal security professionals overburdened. Attempting to follow up on every alert inadvertently distracts your in-house team from monitoring legitimate malicious activity and other important projects. Managed detection and response services alleviate your team’s time expenditure on investigating alerts by accurately identifying threats and prioritizing them based on severity.

Lack of sophisticated threat identification

In an evolving threat landscape, MDR addresses the underlying challenges in sophisticated threat detection. Frequently, legitimate alerts go unnoticed. While in-house security teams focus on threats on an individual basis, they fail to correlate small indicators that contribute to a large-scale attack. Advanced MDR personnel leverage their EDR platform with industry-leading tools giving them the ability to contextualize and examine indicators of compromise (IOC) as well as strategically prevent future cyberattacks on your organization.

Why do you need MDR for your business?

It’s a struggle to maintain a 24×7×365 security posture. Small and medium-sized businesses are often attractive targets for bad actors looking to steal valuable data, extort money from their victims, and more. These businesses often do not have sufficient security expertise to fully protect their IT network structure, drawing attention from cybercriminals as a result.