What is Managed Detection and Response?

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Explained

When a threat actor targets your organization to gain access in your environment and deploy a crippling cyberattack, your ability to detect and contain the threat early will significantly impact how well you can defend against the threat.

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) helps your team gain deep visibility into your environment for 24/7 threat detection, investigation, and response. Engaging an MDR provider allows you to protect your most critical data and assets even after a threat actor gains access into your corporate environment by containing the threat early in the attack lifecycle.

Managed Detection and Response services can provide a significant return on investment by reducing the number of incidents that result in data loss or business interruption and improving recovery times from incidents. In addition, MDR services can help organizations improve their adherence to compliance requirements and better protect their customers.

An MDR service provider should offer the following key capabilities:

1. Threat Intelligence: The MDR service should provide access to up-to-date threat intelligence that can help you identify and mitigate threats before they cause damage. This intelligence should include new threats, vulnerabilities, and malicious actors that could impact your organization.
2. Visibility: The MDR service should constantly monitor your environment for known and unknown threats. This includes monitoring your systems for signs of attack, as well as monitoring the dark web and other sources of threat intelligence for new threats that could impact your organization.
3. Multi-signal Ingestion: The MDR provider should ingest high-fidelity data sources from endpoint, network, log, cloud, insider threat, assets, and vulnerability data to enable visibility into the complete attack surface. As a result, you gain full threat visibility, deep correlation and investigation capabilities, and a faster Time to Contain.
4. Automation: The MDR service should use automation to help speed up the incident response process. This includes automating the collection and analysis of security data and automating the mitigation of threats.
5. Human-led Threat Detection, Response, and Remediation: If a threat is detected, the MDR service should have a robust incident response process in place to quickly investigate and mitigate the threat. This should include experts familiar with your environment to help you respond to incidents quickly and effectively.
6. Ongoing Reporting: How is my provider leveraging data and lessons learned from ongoing MDR operations to reduce my risk over time? The MDR service should provide regular reports on the state of your security posture and the effectiveness of the Managed Detection and Response service in mitigating threats. This can help you track the progress of your security program and make sure that you are getting value from the MDR service.