Key Advantages of Managed eXtended Detection & Response (MXDR)

Indeed, the most glaring issue in cybersecurity today is a lack of skills within organizations. Research data reveals that cybersecurity skill shortage impacts 70 percent of organizations. In turn, this matter results in an increased workload on existing cybersecurity personnel, unfilled security jobs, and lack of expertise needed to utilize security technologies fully and effectively.

Meanwhile, cybersecurity companies and law reported a 50% increase in cyberattacks in 2021 compared to 2020, peaking in December due to the Log4j exploits. As more people work from home during the global pandemic, cyberattacks have skyrocketed as cybercriminals take the opportunity to up threats, both in scope and frequency. Cybersecurity experts report 4,000 cyberattacks a day since the COVID-19 pandemic. Current cyber threats target all types of businesses.

Training and establishing dedicated security departments can offer round-the-clock threat hunting. However, only a handful of organizations, especially large enterprises, can afford it, while many will find it difficult due to limited resources and lack of skills. At the same time, deploying complex detection and response solutions is complex. Such security tools also generate massive volumes of alerts that security teams must examine to identify malicious events. Overall, these challenges overwhelm small security teams, taking away precious resources and time from other tasks.

If you are blind anywhere in your cybersecurity strategy, you are blind everywhere. The current IT environment requires organizations to implement threat detection across the entire IT stack. As criminal hackers devise new attack methods, organizations must seek superior speeds to detect and respond to cyber incidents.

Enhancing Your Cybersecurity Posture Today

With the realization that most organizations lack the resources needed to mitigate risks and respond to threats, some cybersecurity service providers offer MXDR services to improve the way companies detect threats, monitor their IT environments, and respond to incidents.

MXDR vendors have skills, tools, technologies, and procedures to detect and respond to sophisticated and frequent cyber threats. MXDR solutions feature platforms that deliver advanced 24x7 security control, including a range of security activities to detect, analyze, and respond to cyber threats. In particular, MXDR vendors combine threat intelligence, human expertise, machine learning, and advanced analytics in managing incident detection, investigation, and response in endpoints and networks.

Considering MXDR to Augment Your Existing Cybersecurity Strategies

By all means, many companies do not have the time, resources, and skills to set up effective and reliable detection and response functions. Besides, detection and response tasks require expensive tools and technologies.

Sourcing these activities to an MXDR vendor allow organizations to gain a team of experts and access to the latest security technologies at affordable rates. Some of the capabilities offered by an MXDR vendor include:

• Enhanced Security: An MXDR service provider deploys host- and network-based security solutions to guard the company’s information assets and detect threats that pass traditional perimeter security tools. Additionally, MXDR vendors provide recommendations and changes to organizations based on malicious security events, positioning a company against future attacks. MXDR services also have access to global threat intelligence from other regions, industries, and firms.
• Easy to set up and get started: more often, MXDR vendors deliver detection and response services using their own proprietary set of tools and technologies. The security experts can deploy the host- and network-based security solutions in the cloud or on the users’ premises.
• Skills and Expertise: An MXDR vendor is responsible for managing and monitoring MXDR tools, enabling organizations to transfer the role from their strained internal teams. While MXDR vendors can automate their activities, their activities also require humans to monitor networks round-the-clock. MXDR vendors develop a pool of security researchers and engineers responsible for monitoring networks and responding to incidents.
• The Latest and Most Advanced Security Technologies: instead of just relying on security logs, MXDR vendors deploy advanced network and endpoint security monitoring solutions to secure IT environments. On top of that, Managed eXtended Detection & Response activities count absolutely on advanced analytics and security information and event management (SIEM).
• Precision: MXDR vendors empower businesses to detect, analyze, and respond to threats. Throughout this process, the service providers verify if an incident is a real threat before recommending actions to avoid wasting limited resources on false alarms.
• User Support: organizations have direct interaction with MXDR vendor analysts as well as portals and dashboards with alert information and other activities.

Selecting an MXDR Service Provider

A company interested in MXDR to augment their existing cybersecurity strategies should consider the following factors:

• What IT resources need MXDR capabilities? Before settling on a vendor, consider the resources that your organization should secure. Based on the business security needs, select an MXDR vendor that is a perfect fit for that particular business’ IT environment. When choosing an MXDR, their marketing should not dazzle you since it is an evolving and often over-promised offering. Businesses should instead speak in terms of what matters to them, giving specific scenarios that the MXDR platform would prevent.
• MXDR Vendor Technology Stack: since an MXDR service provider augments a company’s security tools and expertise, you should consider a vendor with a comprehensive technology stack and domain expertise.
• Regulatory Compliance: Outsource detection and response services to a vendor that complies with relevant regulations and standards.
• Data Sources: An MXDR vendor should deploy technologies that combine numerous data inputs from diverse security detection tools, threat intel feeds, third-party and industry regulators, among other sources.

Securus360 MXDR Solution

Securus360 is an MXDR solution provider offering 24x7 monitoring of key business and IT areas, such as endpoints, servers, network infrastructure, cloud instances, and user behavior, all on one pane of glass. At Securus360, one size does not fit all. For this reason, our security experts deliver customized MXDR implementations to meet clients’ specific cybersecurity needs.

Securus360 MXDR solution utilizes robust artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models to find the bad actors, contain them, and help organizations eliminate them. Such models are an incredible force multiplier to Securus360 security engineers. With AI and ML models, the team can sift through millions of network events to detect malicious activities for further analysis by human experts.

Securus360 security engineers deploy tools to continuously monitor clients’ networks and analyze data to detect indicators-of-compromise. Based on the discoveries, they prioritize threats for further investigation and impact analysis. Securus360 experts collaborate with the internal security teams of its clients to implement mitigation recommendations.

Securus360 solves the cybersecurity skills gap problem by detecting and responding to advanced and frequent threats that plague an in-house IT team, not to mention the solution cost is a fraction of what a company would spend to build an internal solution with a 24x7 security team monitoring all aspects of a firm’s IT environment.

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