Managed Threat Detection and Response: what it is and how it can help your business

In today’s digital world, cyber threats are commonplace. Businesses large and small are under constant threat. Every day, cyber criminals devise new ways to access confidential data and exploit vulnerabilities in enterprise networks.

This is why more businesses are investing in managed threat detection and response services. These services can be integrated with your existing security solutions to help you detect threats more quickly and respond more effectively.

These services are growing rapidly with a strong reputation for their fast results, and Gartner predicted that 50% of organisations will be using managed threat detection and response services by 2025.

What is Managed Threat Detection and Response?

Managed threat detection and response (MTDR) services are a type of managed security services that offer businesses a proactive approach to cyber risk management. Working alongside your existing IT team, MTDR providers use a variety of tools and techniques to monitor your network for suspicious activity, identify threats, and send you notifications. These include network monitoring, endpoint detection and response, threat intelligence, network traffic analysis, and network traffic visualisation.

As the name suggests, managed threat detection and response services are more than just detection. While detection services use tools like firewalls and antivirus software to identify potential threats, managed threat detection and response services go a step further. With these services, a third-party managed security provider uses a combination of network monitoring and threat detection tools to actively find suspicious activity and send an immediate alert to your designated security personnel.

MTDR services also help you rapidly respond to incidents by providing incident response and forensics services. It uses machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance its threat detection capabilities as it learns more about your network. This ensures that the service stays relevant over time, allowing it to keep up with the latest cybercrime trends and identify threats that your manual processes might miss.

Benefits of Managed Threat Detection and Response

Better visibility and control of threats: Third-party managed threat detection and response services give you better visibility into threats and let you control how they impact your business. With the ability to detect threats earlier, you can catch the bad stuff before it gets through your system and onto your data. This lets you respond faster and in a more controlled manner to minimise impact.

Better detection of advanced threats: Traditional forms of managed security don’t always catch advanced threats. However, MTDR services provide a more robust and sophisticated approach to threat detection. They use a combination of network monitoring and threat detection tools to identify malicious activity faster and more accurately.

Reducing the risk of reputational damage: Data breaches are inevitable, but if managed threat detection and response services are part of your cyber security solution, they have the potential to be less damaging. By detecting threats faster and more accurately, they give you the opportunity to contain incidents and minimise the damage on your reputation.

Improved productivity: Better and faster threat detection means fewer disruptions to your day-to-day operations. This also means fewer missed opportunities, as you can respond more quickly to suspicious activity.

Proactive network defence

MTDR services give businesses the capacity to defend their network proactively. With these services, businesses can deploy sensors or agents to their network that monitor traffic and look for suspicious activity. These sensors can also be programmed to deliver specific alerts when an unusual or malicious activity is discovered, allowing engineers to look for threats that are not easily detectable, such as zero-day exploits and sophisticated malware.

By investing in MTDR, businesses can identify and respond proactively to potential threats before they cause damage. With the right sensors in place, MTDR can also monitor endpoints and servers to look for signs of malicious activity. This allows security teams to catch potential threats before they make their way to the network.

Reduced risk

MTDR services can reduce the risk of incidents and data breaches. By using these services, businesses can increase their visibility into their network, which can help to identify potential threats as they occur. This can help reduce the time between detection and response, which could play a big role in preventing data breaches.

Higher visibility into your network can also help to reduce the risk of false positives. While a false positive can be frustrating, it can also represent a missed opportunity to identify a real threat. An effective managed detection and response service can help to reduce the number of false positives, which saves security teams a great deal of time investigating inaccurate alerts. A recent survey found that 81% of IT professionals stated more than 20% of their security alerts are false positives. Taking the time to check these can cause security analysts to miss critical alerts.

Threat hunting

Threat hunting refers to the process of actively seeking out and identifying potential threats in order to prevent them from materialising. It is a way to proactively keep an organisation’s network safe from cyber-attacks by identifying potential threats before they can do any harm.

Threat analysts look for abnormal or abnormal activity within your systems and network, such as vulnerabilities that haven’t been exploited, or malicious code waiting to be activated.

Detecting suspicious activity

One of the most critical parts of an MTDR service is its ability to detect malicious activity and send notifications to your security team. When a breach occurs, cybercriminals often try to exfiltrate data from your systems as quickly as possible. If your business has a slower detection rate, it’s less likely that you’ll discover the breach in time.

An MTDR solution, however, has the ability to quickly detect breaches. It uses a combination of network monitoring, threat hunting, and detection tools to identify suspicious activity and send alerts to your security team. This way, they can identify potential breaches as they happen and give you time to respond before data gets exfiltrated.

Find the right MTDR service for your business needs

Managed threat detection and response services have become a necessary part of comprehensive security strategies. Sophos MDR is one of the leading cyber security detection and response services available today. It safeguards against computer assaults, monitors for irregular actions, and notifies you when a risk is identified. It’s the ideal service for organisations that need to protect against both ongoing threats and data exfiltration.

Sophos offers businesses a more comprehensive approach to threat detection that gives them a better chance at preventing data breaches. With better visibility into threats and a more accurate method of detecting them, it has the potential to minimise damage and help you respond to incidents more quickly.

The managed Sophos MDR providers at Essential Tech can advise you further about implementing this advanced cyber security service into your infrastructure, and can fully or co-manage it to your business requirements.