9 months. That’s how much time on average was needed for organizations to identify and contain a data breach in 2020.
During this time, companies have been losing around 1 million dollars. To fully secure the businesses, companies need a financially profitable managed security operations center (SOC) that providers of managed detection and response (MDR) services now bring to organizations of any size.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is a service that allows companies to reduce the time for dealing with an incident from months to minutes, minimizing its impact on business continuity and reputation.
What is Managed Detection and Response service
MDR is an outsourced cybersecurity service that provides companies with cybersecurity experts and technology to monitor assets, detect threats, and respond to incidents.
MDR is a remote service created by cybersecurity providers for those organizations which want to improve the cybersecurity posture not recruiting a large team of people or for companies who lack the resources.
With tools used in service, security experts can also detect threats that have passed traditional perimeter security tools. The methods providers use may vary: some rely solely on security logs and others use network security monitoring or endpoint activity to secure your network.
How it works
MDR helps businesses to solve the problem of cybersecurity at the following stages.
Detection
The first tier of security experts’ team is managing and monitoring the customer’s network and endpoint data 24x7x365 performing threat sweeps to identify threats in the organization environment to respond to them as fast as possible.
Noticing anomalies – beacons of potential threat, experts make decisions according to terms of threat prioritization.
Investigation
At this stage, the second tier of protectors starts their work. They analyze the state of things in the customer’s environment, identify the motive of the breach and its origin, the scope of the breach, determine the impact.
Response
After understanding the nature of the threat, further cooperation is developing according to the agreement with the service vendor: the third tier of protectors gives customers step-by-step advice for dealing with the incident or deal with it by themselves.
An analyst expert can perform the remediation when a threat is detected and confirmed through automation, including the use of an orchestration tool (SOAR for Security Orchestration Automation and Response).
Remediation
It’s a stage where the company comes back to the state it had before the breach happened by removing malware, cleaning the registry, ejecting intruders, and removing persistence mechanisms. The system must be entirely operated, and its security improved according to lessons learned from the incident.
Business benefits of MDR
Human involving
The core of every threat is a person with self-interest. That’s why extensively skilled and experienced security experts is a good idea as a part of provided service. They identify unpatterned actions and can notice the most evasive attacks hidden from the automated defense.
Experts also do an analysis of security events and alerting the customer. An essential skill of a security expert is the ability to contextualize and analyze indicators of compromise. Security technologies may have the ability to block threats, but humans will explore the reasons.
No need to incur extra costs of in-company security staff
MDR is the minimum investment. It is too costly for most companies to hire an entire department of cybersecurity personnel.
Or even if you’re willing to spend money, it’s hard to find enough cybersecurity experts. It is much cheaper and reliable for the business to incur costs in outsourced service, which provides the customer with its work-tasted tools, stable techniques, and experts’ skilled team.
Perfect combo
With Managed Detection and Response service, an organization has no need to buy extra tools and services such as SIEM, Endpoint detection, and response (EDR), Incident Response (IR), or SOC-as-a-Service. SIEMs don’t do enough to keep the organization’s data and networks safe. EDR is a subset of MDR, SOC, and IR are parts of MDR service.
4 tips for choosing best suited MDR vendor
The protection of your business depends on the vendor you choose – a lot at stake. It’s better to be picky in this process. Also, MDR is a broad range of services that varies for businesses of different sizes, and with different needs, so you need to know what exactly your organization needs before making decisions.
MDR vendors you choose must increase the tools and expertise you have implemented or offer you a different set. If you don’t have it, you need only the vendors with a full package of tools, experts, and technologies.
That’s what you need to know about the vendor service before choosing one.
How long it is in the market, and how experienced people will be protecting your business.
Learn about the security team’s experience. Ask to show the case studies and to tell about the achievements of the cybersecurity team. The team must be skilled and fully meet your organization’s needs so that you do not have to hire additional staff.
Find out about the communication between you and your vendor.
You need to agree on how the MGU representatives will deliver the work to your team. It’s better when this will be done through a system that your team understands, the system which doesn’t take time to master. We recommend using a central communication hub, such as a single pane of glass console.
How fast you will find out about the incident
How quickly you will find out about an attack attempt should be spelled out in the contract, and you will be informed about it following the SLA. Find out what speed and communication channels the vendor offers (usually, there are several options in which the speed depends on the price).
Working hours
If you don’t have SOC covering your company’s working hours, you need MDR service to monitor 24×7. Remember that hackers don’t have “working hours,” and attacks may happen when victims may be less likely on alert.
