What Is Managed Detection & Response?

By Author: Petri Kairinen
Total Articles: 1
Comment this article

What challenges can MDR address?

One of the most significant problems that Managing detection and response handles most efficiently is the lack of security skills within most organizations. See, you cannot deny the fact that modern businesses suffer from this problem. Big companies can afford to train and support a dedicated team that can handle threat-haunting tasks. But this proposition is almost impossible for smaller companies as their resources are limited, when compared to big organizations. According to reports, medium and large-scale organizations often being of targeted by cyberattacks but lack the manpower and resources for such teams.

Then, there are organizations that are absolutely willing to spend the required time and money. But they struggle to find the right personnel for the job. Reports suggest that there were more than 2 million vacant positions for cybersecurity personnel. And this number could easily reach 4 million by 2023.

In addition, companies also face numerous challenges while deploying complex Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) solutions. They are not usually ...
... maximized due to a lack of skills, time, and funds to train employees for handling the EDR tools. Managing Detection & Response integrates EDR tools into its security implementation. Thus, making them important for the response, detection, and analysis.

An often overlooked issue when it comes to cybersecurity is the sheer volume of alerts security and IT teams regularly receive. Many of these alerts cannot be readily identified as malicious, and have to be checked on an individual basis. In addition, security teams need to correlate these threats, since correlation can reveal whether seemingly insignificant indicators all add up as part of a larger attack. This can overwhelm smaller security teams, and take away precious time and resources from their other tasks.

Managing Detection and Response aims to address this problem not only by detecting threats but also by analyzing all the factors and indicators involved in an alert. MDR also provides recommendations and changes to the organizations based on the interpretation of the security events. One of the most important skills that security professionals need is the ability to contextualize and analyze indicators of compromise in order to better position the company against future attacks. Security technologies may have the ability to block threats, but digging deeper into the how’s, whys, and what’s of incidents requires a human touch.

Managing Detection and Response is designed to solve the problem of an organization’s cybersecurity skills gap. It tackles the issue of more advanced threats that an in-house IT team cannot completely address, ideally at a cost that is less than what the company will need to spend to build its own specialized security team. MDR can also offer the organization access to tools that it may not normally have access to. The diagram below illustrates what an organization stands to gain when MDR comes into play.