How MXDR Can Help Address Cybersecurity and Hiring Concerns

Organizations are increasingly turning to cybersecurity vendors to provide managed extended detection and response, a service that helps businesses discover and respond to threats in a timely fashion. 

Unfortunately, organizations commonly seek out MXDR solutions only after they’ve been breached. But proactive organizations are adopting MXDR in response to escalating cyberthreats, the cybersecurity talent shortage, new requirements from their insurance providers, and a desire to consolidate cybersecurity environments. Here’s a breakdown of these key areas and how an MXDR solution can help.

According to recent analysis by Accenture, the number of cyberattacks between 2020 and 2021 increased by 125 percent. You’d be hard-pressed to find an expert who expects the trend to reverse itself this year. Ransomware, in particular, continues to cause significant disruptions across the energy and healthcare industries, among others, and the cost of these attacks can be quite high. With so much at stake, so many systems and data stores to safeguard and such a high volume of attacks, many business and IT leaders are choosing to outsource parts of their cybersecurity operations.

Even before the pandemic, cybersecurity expertise was in short supply and high demand. Fast-forward to today’s tight job market, and many organizations are having trouble filling so-called low-skill jobs, let alone cybersecurity positions. There’s been a growing trend across IT in recent years to engage with external service providers and resource suppliers. The public cloud, for instance, has helped many organizations move away from on-premises data centers. MXDR solutions allow IT shops to do the same for onsite security operations, if they want — and a shortage of cybersecurity expertise is driving many to do just that.

IT leaders aren’t the only ones taking note of increased cyberattacks. So are the cybersecurity insurance providers who have to pay out claims when an organization’s environment is breached. These insurers have stepped up their requirements over the past couple of years, increasing their premiums — or even denying coverage completely — for businesses that fail to take certain steps to protect their IT resources. Depending on the vendor, MXDR solutions may include 24/7 monitoring, critical alerting, root cause analysis and around-the-clock “eyes on glass” support.

As cyberthreats have grown, so too have many organizations’ cybersecurity environments, to the point that some businesses are running security solutions from as many as a dozen vendors. Eventually, managing all those disparate tools becomes burdensome for internal IT staffers, and MXDR solutions represent one way to consolidate environments. Consolidation can help organizations battle “alert fatigue,” which can happen when cybersecurity tools generate thousands of alerts per day, and there’s simply no way for internal cybersecurity staff to keep up. By consolidating their environments to limit the number of redundant or meaningless alerts, organizations can free up internal staff for more strategic projects.

When it comes to successful cyberattacks, it’s not a matter of if, but when. There’s a corollary to this: IT leaders are judged not only by their ability to stop breaches, but also by their ability to respond quickly, mitigate the damage and assess how the intrusion occurred. MXDR solutions can help by providing much needed expertise, meeting increasingly stringent cybersecurity insurance requirements, and consolidating the cybersecurity stack to improve efficiency in proactive threat hunting, detection and response.

Story by Alex Malm