What is Managed Detection and Response (MDR)?

Your guide to cybersecurity’s stress-free threat response.

Definition

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is a cyber security service that provides organisations with a team of experts who can hunt, monitor, and respond to threats as they appear across their IT Infrastructure.

What is Managed Detection and Response (MDR)?

MDR is the complete package, confirming that your security posture is robustly protected. Managed Detection and Response (MDR) goes beyond protection, and provides actionable insights, giving you the clear-cut steps to address threats and help prevent future attacks. It also frees up your internal teams and allows them to focus on more pertinent issues. As your business grows and cyber needs evolve, MDR will scale accordingly as your team of experts can tailor the service to you.

The current problem with cyber solutions.

The current cyber landscape is becoming confusing, and your company is increasingly required to implement even more solutions for the emerging threats. Threat actors are evermore advanced in their knowledge of company infrastructures. From this, terms such as SIEM, NDR, EDR, vulnerability assessments, and others are becoming more relevant. For each of these solutions, you have to choose from a multitude of vendors. This creates a problem for your IT team who have to then manage and implement a complex stack of technologies. Additionally, new government regulation has been introduced to ensure companies have robust security in place and Cyber Insurance providers are much stricter in their eligibility criteria. Sophisticated attackers are exploiting even the slightest vulnerabilities. In this ever-changing landscape, relying solely on traditional, siloed security measures simply isn’t enough.

The SOC triad in its traditional form makes it hard to justify the investment due to its expensive data ingest, hardware, and licensing costs​. At the same time, the current skills shortage in the UK is becoming a more pressing issue as a recent government report revealed with 50% of all UK businesses have a basic cyber security skills gap.

As hackers never rest, cyber security is a 24/7 issue, which increases the cost required for businesses to manage these threats round the clock. This is not helped by the high number of false positive threats that can emerge when security technology is not continually optimised. The false positives generate repetitive work and reduces employee productivity.​

As cyber threats are becoming more advanced, this has also created visibility gaps for legacy systems​ which are no longer able to identify and remove unknown potential threats. We have explored this problem when comparing Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) with traditional Antivirus (AV) solutions, and we concluded that legacy systems, such as in this case, antivirus software, are no longer sufficient. MDR provides a SOC team of threat hunting experts which are up to date with technology and cyber security trends.

Why Managed Detection and Response (MDR)?

Implementing Managed Detection and Response (MDR) into your security infrastructure hands the responsibility of daily threat detection and response over to a trusted partner. This enhances your security and provides greater visibility into your whole network, without you having to worry. You have access to expertise and knowledge from dedicated security professionals, ensuring your business benefits from the latest advancements in cybersecurity.

Compared to building and maintaining an in-house security team, MDR offers a cost-effective solution with immediate ROI. It frees up your internal team, giving more time to focus on core business functions. It is also priced on a predictable, subscription-based model, meaning there are no hidden costs.

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is beneficial due to its scalability and flexibility. It can be quickly implemented into existing infrastructures and will grow according to the business. This makes MDR an extremely desirable service which can be easily modified to individual needs. Rapid detection and response minimise downtime and ensure your business operations remain uninterrupted.

Red Helix Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

Red Helix delivers this protection by combining Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR), Network Detection & Response (NDR) and Security Information & Event Management (SIEM) to complete the ‘SOC visibility triad:

1. We feed your IT infrastructure data through our EDR and NDR tools.
2. We then parse the data through our SIEM.
3. Our UK based 24x7x365 Security Operations Centre (SOC) monitors events and responds appropriately.

We Manage the best of breed technology across EDR, NDR and SIEM to detect threats from: applications, network, cloud, user behaviour, endpoints, security logs, and any custom data you need us to integrate.

We Detect and contain threats using active threat hunting, 24x7x365 monitoring, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Our SOC team works around the clock, providing incident Response to alerts, reporting to, and supporting your team to manage vulnerabilities.

Get in touch with us today to find out how this will benefit you.