Managed detection and response (MDR) services, which enable businesses to address a wide range of cyber threats more quickly and effectively, have become a vital security solution in recent years. The rise and increasing adoption of MDR stems from the growing concerns regarding traditional managed security service providers (MSSP).

This is because, despite the popularity of MSSPs in helping businesses strengthen their threat alerting and monitoring, they can no longer defend against current and emerging cyber threats. Many MSSPs only provide basic monitoring and alerting that cannot provide the level of guidance and context necessary to effectively pinpoint, respond to, and remediate genuine security incidents. Furthermore, should the business's in-house resources be under pressure, they may find that MSSPs cannot provide the support they require when they need it most.

An overview of managed detection and response

The exponentially increasing sophistication, variety, and volume of cybersecurity threats causes many organisations to struggle to maintain their security operations centres. In response to this issue, managed detection and response vendors developed a selection of cost-effective services for improving enterprise cybersecurity and mitigating risks that do not require a large, upfront investment.

MDR services offer highly skilled analysts equipped with the latest security tools and up-to-date global databases, usually beyond the reach of most enterprise resources and skill levels. By leveraging these cybersecurity services, companies can ensure they are at pace with the continually evolving threat landscape.

Furthermore, MDR provides a great alternative to chasing the latest developments in cybersecurity products with its integrated Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tools, which many security operations teams often find challenging to learn and maintain. This results in significant improvements to an enterprise's threat detection, monitoring, and analysis without the difficulty and cost of keeping a fully-staffed internal security team with access to the latest threat data.

Lastly, MDR services can go beyond greater detection and response capabilities as they also offer proactive insight into advanced threats and defence intelligence to potentially overwhelmed security teams. These features help improve detection levels, reduce the dwell time of breaches, and make meeting compliance requirements easier, as MDR provides comprehensive stakeholder reporting and log retention.

Key advantages of MDR

1. Full turnkey approach

MDR services supply the tools to better detect and respond to threats alongside the experts responsible for their deployment, configuration, and monitoring. Compared to legacy managed security services, MDR is not defined by its underlying technologies but rather by its turnkey approach built around defined goals and outcomes that tackle specific security use cases.

Therefore, MDR includes threat intelligence, human expertise, and a wide range of detection as part of one complete service offering. The turnkey approach means that deploying MDR services only takes weeks instead of months, reducing time to value and providing businesses with faster, higher quality, and more comprehensive responses to threats.

2. Actionable security insights and outputs

One of the biggest concerns regarding traditional MSSPs is their failure to deliver tangible guidance and insights. In fact, many are seen as simply 'passing alerts over the wall'. In contrast, MDR provides a more outcome-focused and proactive approach to threat detection and remediation, which includes automated responses that disrupt and contain threats before they can do any damage.

MDR uses the latest security tools and intelligence to provide actionable insights that improve an organisation's incident awareness, speeding up their decision-making as well as making it more reliable. Its regular reporting also helps businesses better understand the risks they face and fulfil any relevant compliance requirements like GDPR and more.

3. Provides a genuine response

Legacy MSSPs that usually only monitor certain customer-owned technologies may not offer sufficient detection coverage to uncover and protect against more advanced attacks. This is not the case with MDR services that provide genuine forensics, response, and remediation activities. With its expanded threat coverage and visibility across IT environments, MDR performs well in a wide range of threat scenarios as it can effectively detect malicious activity at its early stages and accelerate the time to resolve it.

Conclusion

MDR services go further beyond what MSSPs offer by providing businesses with the specialist intelligence, technology, and expertise required to detect, contain, and address even the most sophisticated and persistent threat actors day in and day out before they wreak havoc and disrupt operations.

At GROUP8, we provide the cutting-edge solutions you need to achieve a top-notch cybersecurity posture ready for anything. Whether you're ensuring cybersecurity for employees working from home or for your business, our suite of cybersecurity services covers the entire ecosystem – including endpoint security, vulnerability assessment and penetration testing in Singapore, and more. Don't hesitate to contact us at hello@group8.co for more details about our renowned offensive-inspired solutions.