Why your organisation should consider an MDR solution and things to look for in a service offering.
The threat landscape is evolving at breakneck speed and corporate cyberattack surfaces expand, with many trends and developments kicked into overdrive because of the surge in digital transformation investments during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the growth of the attack surface often results in a gap between attackers and defenders, across skills, capabilities and resources. Fortunately, there are things that corporate security teams can do to regain some of the initiative, for example, ensuring that their approach is proactive and considers prevention, detection and response, including possibly by outsourcing capabilities to expert industry partners.
Managed detection and response (MDR) combines all of this. But not all solutions are created equal, so let’s look at why your organisation may need MDR, and things to look for in a service offering.
Why you need MDR.
· Rapid adoption of cloud computing which is outpacing internal skills, leading to misconfigurations that expose organisations to attack.
· An emerging hybrid workplace which means potentially more unmanaged machines at home and more distracted, risk-taking employees using them.
· Ransomware as a service (RaaS), which has democratised the ability to launch sophisticated multi-stage ransomware attacks.
· Use of legitimate tooling for lateral movement, which makes it harder to spot the tell-tale signs of a breach.
· A cybercrime underground saturated with breached data, possibly making it child’s play for attackers to sneak past perimeter defences using legitimate credentials.
· A mature cybercrime economy where individual players, such as Initial Access Brokers (IABs), all have a clearly defined role in the attack supply chain.
· An increase in published CVEs that gives threat actors even more opportunities to compromise their targets.
All these trends and more make compromise more likely.
A Buyer’s Guide to Managed Detection and Response: What is it and why do you need it?
Initial preparations
In this context, a preventative approach to security simply isn’t good enough. Determined threat actors will always find a way into your corporate network, if not via vulnerability exploitation, then by using breached, phished or brute-forced credentials. That means you must add threat detection and response to preventative efforts. This approach posits that if attackers get past your defences, you have the continuous, granular monitoring in place to spot any signs of suspicious activity before the bad guys have had a chance to make an impact. Your SecOps team rapidly responds to contain the incident before it becomes a serious breach.
Extended detection and response (XDR) is an increasingly popular way of achieving this. It combines critical detection capabilities across endpoint, email, cloud and other layers plus response and remediation to stop attackers in their tracks. However, for some organisations, XDR isn’t a panacea. Its usefulness can be limited by:
· In-house skills gaps which mean there are few trained analysts to operate the XDR tooling
· Deployment and management challenges, again due in part to staff shortages and particularly acute when managing XDR across multiple regions
· High cost of staffing and buying and maintaining the right XDR tools
· Alert overload from tools that fail to accurately prioritize threats for stretched analysts
That’s why MDR is increasingly favoured. It effectively hands over management of XDR to an expert outsourcing provider, meaning that their trained analysts handle threat detection, prioritisation, analysis and response.
ESET MDR
Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated by the day, and for many businesses, keeping up with them can feel overwhelming. That’s where we come in. As a trusted IT partner, we’re proud to offer ESET’s Managed Detection & Response (MDR), a powerful, always-on security service that protects your business around the clock.
Built on ESET’s award-winning cybersecurity platform, this service combines advanced threat detection with real human expertise. That means your systems are monitored 24/7/365 by seasoned analysts who can quickly detect, investigate and respond to potential threats before they become problems. No noise. No delays. Just peace of mind.
Whether you’re looking to reduce risk, improve compliance, or simply sleep better at night, ESET MDR is the smart, scalable solution your business deserves. Want to learn more or book a free security consultation? Get in touch with us today and let’s talk protection that works as hard as you do.
