What Is Managed Detection and Response?
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) denotes outsourced cybersecurity services designed to protect your data and assets even if a threat eludes common organizational security controls.
An MDR security platform is considered an advanced 24/7 security control. It often includes a range of fundamental security activities such as cloud-managed security for organizations that cannot maintain their own security operations center. MDR services combine advanced analytics, threat intelligence, and human expertise in incident investigation and response deployed at the host and network levels.
What challenges can managed detection and response address?
Challenge #1: Staffing
Over half of global CISOs have managed multiple major cyber incidents in the last five years, resulting in data loss and significant stress to their security operations teams.
As the volume, variety, and sophistication of cybersecurity threats increase exponentially, organizations struggle to maintain security operations centers staffed with highly skilled personnel and resources. MDR solutions provide a cost-effective menu of services designed to improve an enterprise’s cybersecurity defenses and minimize risk without requiring additional in-house cybersecurity investment.
MDR services provide expert analysts who utilize cutting-edge security tools and up-to-the-minute global databases. These capabilities are beyond the reach of most enterprise budgets, personnel, and resources. Thus, they help organizations keep pace with continually evolving adversarial tactics and techniques.
Challenge #2: Proactive defense
MDR services provide an alternative to enterprises chasing the latest in advanced security products by integrating Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tools.
As a result, an enterprise’s level of threat monitoring, detection, and analysis are improved without the effort and expense required to keep an internal security team fully staffed and up to date with the latest threat data.
MDR services are not limited to greater detection and response capabilities. They also provide proactive defense intelligence and insight into advanced threats to potentially overwhelmed security teams. Detection levels are improved while breach dwell times are reduced.
Compliance challenges also can be met using MDR services, providing full stakeholder reporting and log retention on a wide range of regulations and standards.
Figure 1: Trellix MDR unites the power of Trellix Endpoint Security, Trellix EDR, Trellix Insights, and Trellix ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) with elite expertise, GenAI-powered detection, and 24/7 management.
Benefits of Managed Detection and Response
In the face of seemingly overwhelming security threats and campaigns, organizations are also coping with increasing security budgets and a challenging security job market lean 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 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
New MDR services capabilities heighten security operations
New fully managed services empower organizations to continuously optimize their EPP protections.
For example, services such as Trellix Managed Detection and Response offer 24/7, expert-led detection and response for Trellix Endpoint environments. Such MDR services provide constant updates to prevent, detect, and defend against evolving attacks by generating a continuous feedback loop from EDR to endpoint protection policies.
MDR services fine-tune orchestration, endpoint protection, and EDR environments to proactively protect against threat campaigns. MDR service analysts draw on real-time data to prioritize threats, predict impacts, and prescribe safeguards. They then leverage this information to make configuration, policy, or rule changes to ward off emerging threats.
MDR services augment their investigations with the power of GenAI, which dramatically lowers detection times and MTTR. GenAI highlights critical events, enabling MDR services analysts to detect and respond to threats with pinpoint accuracy.
To successfully navigate today’s—and tomorrow’s—increasingly complex cybersecurity landscape, organizations need to couple the speed of GenAI threat detection with the expertise and insights of managed services analysts.