Note: This post was updated on June 26, 2024.
In today’s battle against advanced cyber threats, CISOs and their teams are often overwhelmed by the complexity of too many cybersecurity tools, related alerts, and the bandwidth necessary to sort through the noise and focus on what matters most.
Like many, you might be feeling uncertain, dealing with strained resources as you try to keep and grow your security team. In many cases, teams are chronically understaffed and may be headed toward burnout.
These are some of the key factors behind the rapid growth of security services like managed detection and response (MDR). It is a market which industry experts expect will grow from $22.45 billion in 2020 to $77.01 billion by 2030.
MDR combines advanced AI technologies with human expertise and, with the right provider, can become a natural extension of your security team. This holistic approach has been shown to be effective for organizations of all sizes.
In creating the new MDR Buyer's Guide, we uncovered many of the reasons organizations first investigate managed detection and response. Let’s briefly explore the top seven we observed.
7 Top Reasons for Managed Detection and Response
- Create or augment 24x7 cybersecurity coverage: cybercriminals and nation-state threat actors work nights, weekends, and holidays. Around-the-clock coverage that seems impossible to achieve at scale, becomes possible without hiring additional staff.
- Manage your cybersecurity spend: Having a fully staffed security operations center (SOC) can be an effective approach to cybersecurity; however, it is also expensive. MDR is a cost-effective way to achieve a similar security result.
- Reduce analyst burnout and turnover: Too many cybersecurity teams are understaffed and getting burned out. MDR provides network defenders with extra help to lower stress and gives them the bandwidth to focus on priority projects. Your analysts also sharpen their skills by working with their managed MDR team.
- Break the cycle of alert fatigue: An artificial-intelligence-powered and human-staffed MDR platform applies context to alerts and threats gathered from endpoint feeds, including email, server, cloud and other network sources. This approach creates quality alerts worthy of further investigation and greatly reduces false alerts.
- Battling advanced threats: The cyber threat landscape is more sophisticated and challenging than ever, as ransomware operators and other cybercriminals increasingly adopt the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of nation-state threat actors. However, this is not a hopeless situation. Robust MDR services make it possible for organizations of all sizes to fight these threats by combining the latest technology with skilled analysts and threat-hunting capabilities.
- Automated response and containment: With managed detection and response, you can orchestrate the triage, filtering, and response of cybersecurity analysts to rapidly detect and remediate attacks. This accelerates response times, reducing potential damage from an attack.
- Reduce tool sprawl: Complexity is the enemy of security, and many organizations are drowning in a sea of point solutions and low-fidelity alerts. MDR cuts down the noise and reduces complexity. It empowers cross-tool threat hunting and seamlessly correlates data integrated from a wide variety of products and third-party vendors.
Resources and Criteria to Evaluate MDR
The security challenges your organization faces are unique, and the potential MDR use cases that are most relevant to you are likely unique, as well. The process of evaluating this approach brings up some key questions to answer before you start shopping for a managed security services provider.
- Is MDR the right approach for my organization?
- What are the key criteria I should use to evaluate MDR vendors?
- Which makes more sense for my 24x7 SOC: build or buy?
Cost is certainly a factor in the final bullet point above. Here's a recent analysis.
