One thing that every company, from the smallest business to the largest enterprise, has in common is that all of them face a world of evolving threats that periodically come knocking on their doorsteps. 

To counter these threats early on, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are looking to spice up their security postures, while enterprises find that they need to cover operations beyond what their security operations centers (SOCs) are able to address themselves. All of this can be alleviated via detection and response, which can work wonders to heighten the security status of any organization willing to utilize it comprehensively.

However, certain skills are required to realize the benefits while also keeping challenges in check. Putting budget aside for the moment, the skilled professionals needed to operate detection and response platforms successfully are hard to come by these days.

So why not employ professionals who know how to manage detection and response without having to allocate extensive resources for further hiring?

What we are talking about is Managed Detection and Response (MDR), which can address threats proactively, deliberately, and indeed, very quickly. Furthermore, management of these capabilities helps immediately address the most demanding aspects of both, deploying and deriving benefits from what can be a complex set of tools and processes.

One of the most important parts of proactive threat hunting is to have the ability to manage the attack surface just like a general would manage a battlefield — to know all the hazards, strategic points, numbers, and logistics.

While the scope and power of standard Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) can serve the needs of businesses of a certain size and maturity, EDR’s complexity may hamper a timely response. In some cases, even with both the AI-powered automation and human skill attributed to in-house SOCs, businesses might still lack the necessary in-depth understanding of a product or the threat landscape.

Approaching the many challenges around detection and response, even with the support of AI for capacity-intense processes like assessing entities and correlation to incident assessment, SOC teams have additional burdens. These include:

• Achieving compliance with industry regulations
• Meeting security needs with minimum impact on business processes while still minimizing incident response times

Due to the numerosity and complexity of some of these burdens, opening a conversation about offloading portions of these responsibilities via MDR can bring into sharper focus which of these operations are mission-critical for your business.

Shrinking the attack surface, covering all endpoints, cloud-first AI-powered operation — while these phrases might sound like a bunch of technobabble from a futuristic movie, they all represent actual possibilities within cybersecurity that can be handled, in most cases, through detection and response solutions such as Extended Detection and Response (XDR).

While detection can work based on automatically created incidents and the many rules in ESET Inspect, leveraging its power for a more intense and rewarding security experience can only be done by working with people who have a close connection with the creators and developers of such detection and response solutions — connecting the telemetry and product into a single experience for the business that is wary of the threats it might face. With the identified set of detection responsibilities offloaded to managing detection processes, the SOC can focus its capacity on response.

Alternatively, response processes can benefit equally from external management, especially when the provider is intimately familiar with the product. The benefits are clear for SMBs that cannot or do not want to manage their own containment and remediation. Larger businesses may want their IT staff to maintain its focus on daily functioning in the knowledge that there is a safety net capable of protecting their business 24/7/365. This is the promise of MDR, and it can supply this in spades.

The difficulty of covering all attack surfaces via D&R depends on a number of factors, including the security expertise a company possesses; its security environment; its budgetary constraints; and external factors such as a lack of potential security recruits, deliberate threat targeting, or even threats vectoring via a company’s supply chain.

These days, it is not only organizations that see a rising need for better protection but also government regulators and cyber insurance companies, who devise requirements to make businesses less complacent and more likely to invest in better security — since oftentimes, an attack on one business or its tool can have a cumulative effect, impacting its partners and customers. This is especially true with supply-chain attacks like SolarWinds or MOVEit. A single weak point or an underestimation of security, and poof; you have not only a single incident but a whole slew of them impacting several different companies that use the same piece of software.

Protection needs to work on every level, for any business, be it small, midsize, or enterprise. But to do so, pre-emptive proactive threat hunting has to be employed first, which MDR can offer, serving as the first step of a multilayered security posture focused on taking care of threats before they transform into incidents.

To ward off any threat, security vendors have to be able to protect against threats at every level, for any business or its verticals.

ESET PROTECT MDR provides a service that can help businesses of all sizes and maturity levels achieve a better security posture 24/7/365, powered by AI and human experts, ensuring enterprise-level protection, gaining security maturity that matches the size, scale, and scope of a business. With custom support aimed at providing comprehensive protection and a rapid response time of 20 minutes, closing cybersecurity gaps, including those created by external forces such as a lack of skilled hires, has never been easier.

As a bonus, ESET PROTECT MDR includes everything in ESET PROTECT Elite, the ESET MDR service, and ESET Premium Support Essential, creating a package that offers an elite security solution coupled with human support and expertise to complete one’s security posture.

A great addition here is also the inclusion of scheduled reports, including advanced behavioral reports provided by ESET LiveGuard Advanced (ELGA), our proactive cloud-based threat defense against targeted attacks and new, never-before-seen threat types, especially ransomware. With these reports, security admins will have a better visibility into what’s happening within their systems, providing a complete overview of how ELGA analyzed a malicious sample.

And for the enterprises that don’t want to leave any room for error, an MDR service can augment their existing security by giving additional breathing room to their SOCs, as policing a global operation takes tremendous resources that could be spent elsewhere.

And that’s why adding MDR to the mix makes sense, as it both adds more expertise and enables an enterprise to enjoy superior cyber risk protection, with access to world-leading threat hunters whose job is to do exactly that — to know how to find and act against threats with a service tailor fit for the enterprise’s whole operation.

All of this is present within ESET PROTECT MDR Ultimate, a service that provides top-notch proactive prevention with superior cybersecurity protection, enabling granular visibility into a company’s whole environment through a tailored security service, to stay one step ahead of all emerging threats. The Ultimate tier also includes remote digital forensic incident response assistance, which helps businesses by overseeing the collection and analysis of incident logs for a better understanding of how an incident happened and how future occurrences can be prevented.

In today’s world, data breaches and security interruptions are not just possibilities, they are inevitable. Customers want partners that can assure them of sound security, and that is where our MDR services come in. We guarantee unparalleled security that can make all the difference between being a successful and an unsuccessful business.
To conclude, cybersecurity should never be taken for granted, it must be given the utmost importance to protect your business and customers from harm. So, focus on cybersecurity, and do it proactively so that threats never breach your doorstep.