The Forrester Wave™: Managed Detection And Response Services In Europe, Q3 2025, is out. The good news is that there’s plenty of choice for any organization looking for the right MDR provider to work with; there truly is a thriving market in Europe with both local and North American vendors in the mix. But it does leave one question.

Key points of this article:

  • Regulatory pressures in Europe are driving businesses to ensure local compliance via region-specific solutions.
  • It is a buyer’s market in Europe — procurers can browse a wide selection of MDR services, all with their individual perks and features to fulfill sector or business specific asks and needs.
  • Non-European vendors can still compete if they build sovereign European operations, which significantly improve security outcomes, as understanding of local regulations, language, and the threat landscape is crucial.
  • However, be mindful that an overly narrow focus on localization can limit access to global threat insights. Balance is key.

Why European MDR?

First and foremost: Why is a European MDR even a thing? A managed service can be delivered from anywhere, after all. In the past that’s helped providers offer scale and technical excellence at either low cost or significant profit, depending on their approach to pricing. Major providers operate multiple Security Operations Centers (SOCs) from every continent except Antarctica to ensure coverage throughout the day, week and year for their customers, and this ability to share the cost of complicated and resource-intensive services is part of the attraction, as is access to a global skills pool.

But any service is more than the sum of its technological parts. The old People, Process and Technology pyramid holds true. A modern Managed Detection and Response service must also now consider these three things in the context of location.

Geopolitics and choice

There are two key issues: First, regulatory pressures, such as NIS2 and DORA, are driving organizations to ensure their data does not leave the borders of Europe, and that means both SOC resources and data storage and processing within the EU, Switzerland and the UK. Bear in mind, of course, that the UK’s relations with Europe and the European Union have changed as a result of Brexit; businesses on all sides of the new equation have to take into consideration the impact of these changes. MDR providers have taken note and, sometimes at great cost, have developed region-specific solutions to this problem.

Second, after an energetic period of growth and expansion in the MDR sector, purchasing organizations now have the luxury of picking and choosing from a huge variety of providers, and that allows them to make particularly granular decisions about the quality and type of service they get. 

Let’s break that down a little.

Local data for local people

Some industry sectors require more than just data residency. Finance, critical national infrastructure and government organizations often need to ensure their entire MDR workflow takes place within the borders of the EU, the UK and Switzerland, or the borders of their country. Aside from general concerns about data security that are pretty much par for the course in these interesting times, Schrems II and the nullification of the EU-US Privacy Shield fallout that resulted have shaped the European data security environment. 

For better and worse, data sovereignty (and EU-localized service delivery) is only of increasing focus for organizations doing business in Europe. To add to this, local regulations in other regions also have an impact. For example, financial services organizations doing business in New York City must comply with the NYDFS Cybersecurity Regulation. 

Note that these pressures don’t rule out MDR providers from outside Europe — far from it, in fact. Those vendors that invest in building a sovereign European capability independent from their parent companies in both operation and governance also participate — and do it well.

Local knowledge, language and context are invaluable

Building a scaled global MDR service with the requisite threat intelligence perspective is one thing, but this needs to be coupled with strong regional threat intelligence, native local language ability and an understanding of regional context to provide a truly effective MDR service. By nurturing local threat intelligence skills and partnerships across the continent, Forrester says, outcomes for Europe-centric threats are delivered far faster than a global vanilla approach.

On top of that, a native-language “ear” means that certain intelligence can be processed in a way that judicious use of translation cannot, and communication regarding risk and severity can be handled in a more precise manner. 

Local and regional understanding of the practical implications and requirements around regulations and associated government policies is also hugely valuable. Local interpretation of EU-wide regulations, in the form of national laws, can also produce unintended consequences for the uninitiated. 

In the heat of an incident, even clear communication in the same language can be fraught with risk. Highly localized threat intel, as well as strict data governance and operations staffed and located within Europe, can make a significant difference to outcomes.

Balance compliance, sovereignty and wider perspective

That said, taking a myopic view of how and where your security provider should be doing business is not healthy. There’s a huge difference between robust data and organizational governance to ensure compliance and missing out on the input and insight of teams of researchers around the world. 

For example, while ESET delivers both MDR within the ESET PROTECT Platform and threat intelligence feeds from within Europe, its threat and security research also calls on a large team based in Canada and across the globe to ensure its industry-leading six-minute MDR response time.

European MDR is robust – and a buyers’ market

The number of vendors providing truly effective Europe-specific operations is significant — and it’s worth digging into the full Forrester report for more insight. However, it’s actually quite difficult to buy a bad MDR service these days — especially if it’s from one of the 11 organizations Forrester mentions. 

That doesn’t mean that all of them achieve the same result by the same approach, or that they are a perfect match for all potential customers. For example, ESET PROTECT customers can point to strength in depth for organizations with a high number of endpoints in operation, hands-on support and local language capabilities. Other organizations will look for detailed primary research into more unusual or esoteric threat groups, with less emphasis on layered or automated detection and response.

European MDR is now a market thriving with competition, and that means detailed evaluation by potential customers is well worth the investment.