Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) face several limitations in the war against modern security threats. Not only can a wave of threat alerts overwhelm SMBs, but there is also a usual lack of financial capacity to beef up the security team.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) will solve these challenges and more. By considering MDR, you can improve your security posture and ease the workload of your staff. Even if your SMB lacks sufficiently skilled personnel to undertake sophisticated threat detection and management, you won't have to worry.
What is Managed Detection and Response?
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is an outsourced cybersecurity service designed to identify and manage security threats. MDRs also incorporate the human element in their operations. This involves threat intelligence, network monitoring, incident investigation, and threat response.
With MDR services, you can place your security worries mainly in the hands of highly skilled professionals working remotely to stop threats in their tracks.
What Security Challenges Do SMBs Have?
Like enterprises, small and medium-sized businesses also need to protect mountains of sensitive data. However, SMBs have different cybersecurity measures than multinational organizations. You can easily spot these differences in the following areas:
- Cyber Threats: Digitalization, cloudification, and a surge in IoT devices have increased the attack surface and made SMBs a low-hanging fruit. Threat actors are now targeting SMBs with sophisticated cyber attack techniques including the use of targeted customized malware, ransomware, and other tools to exploit the SMB's vulnerabilities
- Lack of Security Knowledge: Due to a lack of security experts, SMBs may not have enough expertise or knowledge to implement and manage security measures and tools. This leaves them vulnerable to cyberattacks.
- Limited Resources: As an SMB, you may not have enough budget to build an in-house security team with advanced, sophisticated security tools. Ultimately, you may have to work it the other way around, leaving SMBs vulnerable to attacks.
- Compliance Requirements: SMBs may be subject to compliance requirements like HIPPA or PCI DSS, which can only be met with suitable security measures.
- Outdated Systems and Software: SMBs are prone to attacks due to outdated systems or software that are not upgraded or updated to the latest releases. Misconfigurations in software can also lead SMBs to security breaches.
How MDR Can Better Protect Your Business
MDRs represent one of the finest human-machine meeting points in the global cybersecurity campaign. With MDRs' 24/7 services, machine learning (ML) and humans play a joint role in enhancing your security posture while easing your team's overwhelming responsibility. Here's how:
Threat Hunting
With MDR, service provider experts can contribute their experience of attack techniques, knowledge, and even intuition to check for traces of compromise. MDR services also utilize the threat-hunting assistance of automated security technologies to provide a complete effort. Moreover, MDR service providers also use other sources like open, public, closed, and proprietary sources for threat intelligence to gather more meaningful data about adversaries and their tactics. With smaller in-house teams, it's time-consuming and cumbersome to advance threat hunting and extract the matching data of your concern.
Threat Prioritization
Faced with a constant barrage of security alerts, SMBs can benefit from MDRs to separate false positives from credible threats. MDR categorizes threats based on their levels of danger and urgency. This threat prioritization capability is especially helpful in preventing the typically lean SMB security teams from going on wild goose chases.
Investigation
With solid and in-depth investigative skills, it is easier to execute a comprehensive threat response. This is especially true when it comes to the thoroughness of findings needed to correlate various signals from networks, endpoints, logs, and the cloud and identify sources for further action or digital forensics.
MDR services help SMBs understand threats more rapidly by providing greater context. This capability facilitates a more superficial investigation, thereby providing a richer understanding of the origin and impact of a threat. MDR will also show the level of compromise and what segments of your system were affected.
Incident Handling
With proper incident response, SMBs can reduce the impact of cyberattacks. MDR will respond to security incidents more effectively by quickly restoring the system to normal operations using advanced remediation tools and incident response guidelines. Moreover, MDR also offers the Guided Response feature to advise on how to contain and remediate a particular threat.
A Small Confusion
There is an element of confusion between MDR and Extended Detection and Response (XDR), which needs to be dispelled before moving further for better understanding.
MDR and XDR assist security teams in dealing with increasing workloads and limited resources. However, they approach the problem differently.
MDR addresses these security team challenges by supplementing an organization's internal security team with external resources. An MDR service provider will provide an external SOC to perform most or all of the tasks required to monitor and protect an organization's IT assets. An MDR provider will almost certainly employ XDR solutions. However, they will be managed by external SOC analysts rather than an in-house team. When an organization partners with an MDR provider, it can benefit from significant cost savings compared to maintaining an equivalent SOC in-house and on-demand access to specialized security talent.
Furthermore, having an in-house XDR solution requires more investment, resources, and highly skilled security professionals to operate it efficiently. In contrast, MDR offers lower hiring costs, addresses understaffing issues effectively, and provides the vendor's promised service 24/7.
Today's Investment is Building Tomorrow's Growth
MDR is one of the building blocks for a business that is set for significant growth in the near future. By 2028, the Managed Detection and Response market is anticipated to reach a value of $6.1 billion, expanding at a market growth rate of 16.8% CAGR.
As an SMB, a successful cyberattack can kick you out of business. Due to the low tolerance of SMBs against cyber-attacks, it's tough to survive when threats and vulnerabilities are evolving daily. It is difficult for SMBs to allocate a dedicated budget to cyber security. However, at some point, you must make this investment to keep your business secure and running to achieve your long-term goal. Multiple great running businesses have been closed due to successful cyber-attacks, so it's better to invest in something that can save you a fortune.
Takeaway
Small and medium-sized businesses need all the help they can get to meet security requirements. Managed Detection and Response solves many of the challenges that SMBs have with cybersecurity.
These challenges include longer threat detection and response times, which could extend to weeks or even months. MDRs also reduce the strain on inadequately staffed security teams, fill up skill gaps, and single out more important threat alerts from false flags.
It's time to get it right. MDR takes your company to the next level of security, integrating multiple solutions and freeing you from reliance on largely inadequate traditional methods.