Why MDR?
There Is a Difference with Managed Detection and Response

First, understand the different offerings in the marketplace:

MSSP
Managed Security Service Provider

MDR
Managed Detection and Response

With the alphabet soup that is cybersecurity, it’s important to understand the difference between your service provider options. It is not always a “better vs. worse” conversation, but we believe that the focused approach of Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is the right solution for most organizations and here’s why.

The lack of resources, tools, expertise and support has driven organizations to invest in managed detection and response (MDR) as a core technology for their security programs.

In the Beginning…

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are designed to address the multitude of solutions found in today’s modern technology environments. As technologies are added and security enhancements become a necessary requirement, organizations realize they don’t have the resources to manage everything. Enter Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs). From basic firewall management to complex SIEM (Security Information Event Management) configuration and alert triage, MSSPs have expanded their service offerings to include cybersecurity thus growing in complexity. However, they’ve become constrained by the same challenge that internal security teams face – lack of resources.

As new services are added, MSSPs must find the resources to manage these modern technologies and manage them better than their customers can. One minute an MSSP is taking a request to make a firewall change, the next they are responding to a round of SIEM alerts. Customers expect all of this to happen seamlessly and quickly which, unfortunately, is not always the case. As workloads increase, it’s not uncommon, due to the “spread thin” nature of their teams, for MSSPs to respond far too slowly. Even common firewall rule changes can take over 24 hours to complete, leaving customers exposed.

The problem is one of focus. MSSPs have evolved as the market, and customers, have demanded, but this evolution has not been easy. As the increasingly important challenge for organizations is detecting and responding to threats quickly, MSSPs have been slow to address this requirement due to the need to support legacy activities.

When it comes to cybersecurity, detection and response is vital. Read almost any security report and you’ll hear about dwell time – the amount of time a cybercriminal is on your network before you detect it. By most accounts, the average is still months. And some of these reports are from MSSPs talking about their own customers. The truth is, most MSSPs are good at management of the foundational security elements. Their attempts to deliver high-quality detection and response services are lacking.

Managed Detection and Response Brings the Focus and Speed

Since the issue is focus, why not build a service that emphasizes the key attack vectors and is dedicated to the fastest detection and response possible.

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) was the initial foray in this area, as both vendors and customers (and cybercriminals) realized that traditional anti-virus (AV) was no longer effective, yet the endpoint was still under attack. While EDR has proven to be extremely effective it, too, has fallen victim to alert fatigue syndrome. Increased endpoint visibility was immensely powerful and automatically responding to certain actions proved effective, but there was still a lack of coordination between alerts across multiple vectors.

GoSecure Titan Managed Detection and Response (MDR) –
helping you detect and respond faster than you ever thought possible. Defend against breaches with an industry-leading 15-minute response time from detection to mitigation.

Enter Managed Detection and Response (MDR). Building on the promise of EDR, Managed Detection and Response takes things a step further by looking beyond the endpoint, correlating events from other common attack vectors. From the outset, MDR was designed to facilitate fast detection and response. People, processes and technology were developed with this singular goal in mind. By starting with detection and response, MDR was better able to address other areas as they were added to the MDR sphere of influence. Rather than starting with firewall management and trying to figure out how to deliver timely detection and response, MDRs asked how they can incorporate firewall events in to MDR, while maintaining the same speed of response. This is the intrinsic difference between an MSSP and MDR – detection and response is the only goal.

So, how do MDR companies focus more on detection and response, you ask?

It’s simply a difference in goal. GoSecure Titan® Managed Detection and Response was built with this one idea in mind – detecting and responding as quickly as possible. Everything else we do is complementary to this goal and will not distract us from achieving it.

Would you like to talk to a security expert about the Managed Detection & Response difference?

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