Security operations solutions are essential to stopping today’s cyber threats.
As cyber attacks evolve and sophisticate, cybersecurity must also change to prevent major incidents and data breaches. Defending against current threat actors requires a dynamic, adaptable approach that’s as evolved as cybercriminals’ tactics. While there’s a plethora of tools on the market that can help organizations track data, detect threats, and even utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to map events across their environment, a tool is only as effective as the human utilizing it. With security architecture only increasing in complexity, and organizations perennially struggling to keep security expertise in-house, it’s become clear that tools alone won’t keep organizations secure.
This is where managed detection and response (MDR) changes the game. MDR, as defined by Gartner, provides “customers with remotely delivered security operations center (SOC) functions. These functions allow organizations to perform rapid detection, analysis, investigation and response through threat disruption and containment.” Additionally, Gartner predicts that, “By 2028, 50% of findings from managed detection and response providers will be focused on, or include detail on, threat exposures, up from 10% today.” That’s a major increase in use in MDR for proactive cybersecurity, and for good reason. A solution that takes an operational approach, combining the best in technology with the expertise and adaptability of humans allows organizations to not only detect threats, but respond to them swiftly while working to proactively harden their attack surface over time.
Before diving into the details, it’s important to note that MDR and a security operations center (SOC) are not interchangeable. Whereas a SOC consists solely of an internal or third-party team and their processes for protecting an organization, an MDR solution combines a SOC with monitoring and detection technology. An external SOC is part of MDR’s offering, but not the entirety of it.
Now, let’s look at exactly why MDR represents the future of cybersecurity and how organizations can take advantage of these capabilities.
What To Look For in an MDR Solution
1. A Dedicated Security Team
Every business has its own unique processes, goals, and security concerns. By investing in an outsourced security team, an organization can ensure that their cybersecurity is managed by trained experts who understand the specific network environment and organizational business risks — and who can adapt goals as those needs change over time.
In addition, it’s not news that the security skills gap continues to plague organizations’ security and IT departments, and organizations are learning to do more with less, increasingly turning to outsourced solutions to this persistent problem.
Outsourcing allows organizations to stay secure without having to strain their budget or rely on inexperienced, overworked experts in-house. A strong MDR solution will be human led, providing 24×7 eyes-on-glass and active response. More than managing tools, this team is continuously monitoring the environment, detecting threats, and leading the response.
2. Continuous Security Monitoring with Broad Visibility
24×7 monitoring is now table stakes for MDR solutions, as organizations adapt to an “always open” mentality and cybercriminals take advantage of off-hours to launch attacks. But monitoring means little if the visibility is obscured.
Unlike endpoint solutions or even endpoint detection and response (EDR) and managed EDR, MDR offers broad visibility into an organization’s environment, connecting to web-based applications and covering ground from the network to identities to the cloud.
This visibility highlights the inherent value of an MDR solution, as the turnkey nature and human support allows for better deployment and visibility compared to EDR. In the recent State of Cybersecurity: 2024 Trends Report, Arctic Wolf learned that 54% of organizations are unable to reach full deployment of their endpoint solutions, with 70% looking to replace those solutions within the next year.
3. Personalized, Customizable Security Rules
The top MDR solution providers use a customizable rules engine to define security policies for each customer. This engine allows the provider’s security engineers to apply exact security and operational policies, and then update them to align with changing business needs, new and evolving threats, and any applicable rules and regulations.
Using a set of customized security rules, an MDR team can selectively filter out noisy events that represent no real security risk, allowing them to stay focused on detecting both known and unknown threats. While other SOC-focused tools, notably SIEM solutions, can customize alerts, MDR solutions utilize their own security teams to fine-tune and adjust the alerting and security rules as needed, saving the organization time and resources. This is in stark contrast to the SIEM “do-it-yourself” model, where internal engineers are tasked with continuously adjusting rule sets. Alert fatigue is costly, and by utilizing new methods like machine learning, MDR solutions are eliminating false positives and setting organizations up for security success.
4. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Capabilities
While the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in cybersecurity is not new, the rapid interest and adoption certainly is. According to a recent survey by Arctic Wolf, “98% of respondents plan to allocate some portion of their upcoming cybersecurity budget towards AI,” and “64% of respondents indicated that their organization is highly likely to adopt an AI-centric solution.”
The fact is, it’s impossible for humans alone to analyze the massive amounts of log data coming from even the most modest IT environments organizations have. The only way to efficiently and effectively analyze high volumes of log data is by augmenting human expertise with machine learning algorithms. A next-generation MDR provider leverages the agility and adaptability of cybersecurity experts alongside AI and ML to filter out false positives and fine-tune algorithms as new threats are detected, making sure that your security system is an accurate reflection of your business’s policies and risk assessments. The pairing of technology and human expertise puts MDR solutions a step above traditional monitoring tools.
5. Cloud Threat Monitoring and Detection Capabilities
Cloud-based technology applications are now mainstream and essential for business productivity, with 99% of organizations utilizing at least one form of the public or private cloud. So, modern IT environments need MDR solutions with integrated cloud monitoring to ensure there are no security blind spots.
Cloud security has become a top concern for organizational leaders, and with good cause. Only 40% of organizations stated that they are securing their cloud resources effectively. A strong cloud monitoring system will monitor internet-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS), and security-as-a-service (SECaaS) solutions. Using APIs, virtual sensors can provide near real-time monitoring of cloud resources and user behavior to ensure they comply with an organization’s security policies and are free from threats. While other tools may take to the cloud, many, like traditional SIEM solutions, are not configured to accurately secure an organization’s cloud environment. MDR solutions, however, are now becoming not only cloud-capable, but cloud-native, ingesting and analyzing the cloud environment as they would on-premises applications.
Learn more about securing your cloud.
6. Compliance Reporting
Cybersecurity compliance is complicated, and reporting is a major part of it for organizations needing to stay compliant. Additionally, compliance often means adhering to multiple frameworks and reporting to multiple governing bodies. In fact, 67% of organizations surveyed by Arctic Wolf follow between one to three sets of guidelines.
An MDR provider should offer experience and guidance that enhances automated systems, allowing organizations to work toward regulatory obligations and concurring security measures, and demonstrate compliance through detailed reporting.
Learn how Arctic Wolf’s MDR solution assists with specific compliance requirements across industries.
7. Log Data Collection/Correlation
Comprehensive, user-friendly log management is important for organizations to understand their security environment and make better security decisions. MDR solutions provide this capability, including the automatic collection, aggregation, and retention of log data. This collection can not only assist with compliance needs, but the accurate collection and correlation can make a major impact when investigating a potential threat or when a digital forensics expert is investigating an environment during an incident.
See how Arctic Wolf helps a leading firm gain visibility into their various data logs.
8. Scalable Data Architecture
No organization is static, so security and operational needs are always evolving based on external and internal factors. Because of outside management, often predictable pricing, and flexible capabilities, MDR solutions can evolve alongside your organization.
A strong MDR solution should have security-optimized data architecture that can unify the ingestion, parsing, and analysis of log data, and which can also dynamically scale, compute, and store resources on demand. A scalable cybersecurity architecture forms a strong foundation on which to build the analytics that give security analysts deep visibility into advanced threats. Scalable data architecture also provides on-demand access to relevant data for incident investigation and is immediately operational with no setup time.
9. Modern Threat Detection and Active Response
When it comes to MDR, the human element is crucial, the 24×7 monitoring is important, but at the end of the day, if the solution can’t detect threats, it’s not working for your organization.
The reason modern MDR solutions continue to gain momentum is because they are purposefully designed for this modern age where hybrid work models meet rapidly digitizing organizations and threats continue to evolve, from new strains of ransomware to the proliferation of identity-based attacks and business email compromise (BEC). Threats evolve, work models evolve, and MDR is there every step of the way.
Gartner calls MDR’s threat detection and active response a “must-have” capability: “The availability of immediate remote mitigative response, investigation and containment activities (such as quarantining hosts), beyond alerting and notification, delivered and coordinated by service providers’ staff and pre-approved by end users.”
Explore MDR in-depth with the MDR Buyer’s Guide.
See how utilizing a security operations solution like Arctic Wolf can save your organization budget and resources while improving your cybersecurity.
