Corporate IT and security teams have the unenviable task of keeping relentless and increasingly sophisticated adversaries at bay. They’re often faced with limited resources and expanding attack surfaces, but recruiting and retaining top-tier security professionals to run an in-house Security Operations Centre (SOC) is out of reach for many organizations.

At the same time, threats continue to evolve and adversaries hone their techniques, leading to incidents that often grind business operations to a halt.

To avoid being caught on the back foot, defenders need an approach that’s proactive and combines prevention, detection, remediation with accurate and timely threat intelligence. If building that capability in-house is impractical, then renting or buying it as a service is a more realistic option.

This isn’t a new concept, of course – smaller organizations have enjoyed the benefits of new IT innovations for decades through bureaux, managed services providers and cloud computing.

There’s a strong argument to be made for doing the same with advanced cybersecurity services, and this where Managed Detection and Response (MDR) can make a major impact. MDR gives organizations a proactive, expert-driven and scalable threat monitoring and hunting capability, without the cost of an elite SOC.