Address risk
MDR addresses risks that plague modern businesses. The most glaring issue is a lack of security skills within organizations. While training and setting up dedicated security teams that can do full-time threat hunting may be feasible for larger organizations that can afford it, most companies will find it a difficult proposition given their resource limitations. This is especially true for medium and large organizations that often find themselves being the target of cyberattacks but lack the resources or manpower for such teams.
Even organizations that are willing to spend both time and money might find it difficult to actually acquire the right personnel. Both cost and skill gaps have intensified: 10.5 Trillion in anticipated costs, and openings in jobs to rise to 3.5 million by 2021.
Enterprises also face challenges when deploying complex endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions, which are usually not being maximized due to a lack of time, skills, and funds to train personnel to handle the EDR tools. MDR integrates EDR tools in its security implementation, making them an integral part of the detection, analysis, and response roles.
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.
MDR 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 hows, whys, and whats of incidents requires a human touch.
MDR 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.
