Five Signs Your MDR is Making You Do its Job
Your managed detection and response (MDR) provider flags suspicious activity, and your analyst spends the next hour finding the account, checking logs, and deciding whether anything needs to happen.
Your managed detection and response (MDR) provider flags suspicious activity, and your analyst spends the next hour finding the account, checking logs, and deciding whether anything needs to happen.
By the time the investigation is underway, the alert feels less like help and more like a task assignment; mDR should bring your team capacity and expertise when it needs them.
A monthly report might show hundreds of alerts reviewed and dozens of investigations opened; that gives you a sense of volume, though it says little about what the provider found or did.
A suspicious login involving an account with broad access deserves a different response from the same activity on a tightly restricted account.
The systems within reach, their importance to the business, and any known weaknesses all help determine what needs attention first.
If the service keeps handing the hardest work back to your analysts, these five signs can help you work out where the arrangement is falling short.
Even an alert worth investigating is only so useful when your team has to gather the basic context before it can make a decision.
Find out how your provider uses information about assets, identities, vulnerabilities, and current threats, including what it can help you address before an incident occurs.
Take a few recent alerts and look at what your provider had already checked when it contacted you.
When your MDR leaves your team to assemble that picture during an investigation, valuable time goes into finding context that could have informed the response from the start.
You should be able to see how it separated routine activity from a credible threat, and what it did to stop familiar noise from coming back, and when a provider contains a threat and closes the case, your team should come away with more than a record of what happened.
What happened
Your managed detection and response (MDR) provider flags suspicious activity, and your analyst spends the next hour finding the account, checking logs, and deciding whether anything needs to happen.
By the time the investigation is underway, the alert feels less like help and more like a task assignment; mDR should bring your team capacity and expertise when it needs them.
What changed
A monthly report might show hundreds of alerts reviewed and dozens of investigations opened; that gives you a sense of volume, though it says little about what the provider found or did.
Who is affected
A suspicious login involving an account with broad access deserves a different response from the same activity on a tightly restricted account.
The systems within reach, their importance to the business, and any known weaknesses all help determine what needs attention first.
Why it matters
If the service keeps handing the hardest work back to your analysts, these five signs can help you work out where the arrangement is falling short.
Even an alert worth investigating is only so useful when your team has to gather the basic context before it can make a decision.
Technical details
Find out how your provider uses information about assets, identities, vulnerabilities, and current threats, including what it can help you address before an incident occurs.
Response
Take a few recent alerts and look at what your provider had already checked when it contacted you.
When your MDR leaves your team to assemble that picture during an investigation, valuable time goes into finding context that could have informed the response from the start.
What security teams should do
You should be able to see how it separated routine activity from a credible threat, and what it did to stop familiar noise from coming back, and when a provider contains a threat and closes the case, your team should come away with more than a record of what happened.