It’s the beginning of the season and you’re looking at a long roster of players—some in the major leagues, some in the minors—trying to pick the winners who will comprise your dream team. Only instead of a baseball lineup, you’re trying to pick the winning Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services provider, and the choices are overwhelming.
Research and advisory firm, Gartner, says, “MDR services are available from a range of providers (well above 100 providers as of this research).”
If you’re a small- to mid-sized (SMB) organization looking to partner with an MDR services provider, where do you start? How do you draft a “star player” from such a large list of potential MDR offerings to find the right fit for your organization?
With its list of Representative Vendors, we believe the latest MDR research report from Gartner can be a great starting point. Called the Gartner® Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services 1 , this report defines and describes the MDR market and the specific services that providers can be delivering to meet the unique needs of the buying organization.
Pondurance rounds all of the bases, and we believe we meet all of the attributes that Gartner ascribes to MDR services and successful service providers (and more).
A look “into the dugout” at our 24/7/365 remotely-delivered modern security operations center (SOC) will reveal:
- An open, managed technology stack that provides best-in-class detection and response across network, endpoint, log and cloud infrastructure.
- A fully staffed, US-based team of security analysts and experts that interacts with you daily—either directly or online through a cloud-based service portal—and who significantly enhance your overall security knowledge and capabilities.
- Proven processes for detection and response that are customized to your security goals and requirements.
- Robust remote response capabilities, including the ability to provide closed-loop Incident Response (IR), where we partner closely with you to respond to threats through instant triage and integrated IR services.
While we use proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies in our SOC, humans and human intelligence are critical when it comes to identifying real threats. The elite and well-trained security analysts, threat hunters and incident responders that are unique to Pondurance have often been the difference between swift containment and business impact.
Gartner states, “Other elements of MDR are emerging in the market, but are not yet commonplace.” We believe Pondurance delivers capabilities like these, including:
- Providing Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR). Our experienced team of Incident Responders, Incident Handlers, and Forensic and Malware Specialists work to guide you every step of the way to identify, contain, eradicate and recover from a breach.
- The ability to monitor and detect threats across a diverse range of telemetry sources including networks, logs, endpoints and cloud environments—AWS, GCP and Azure—as well as SaaS applications.
- Offering a Vulnerability Management Program (VMP) and other validation capabilities. A key component of the Pondurance MDR solution, our VMP combines periodic vulnerability scanning with penetration testing. We continually identify, categorize and prioritize vulnerabilities, and provide actionable insights to mitigate potential threats.
- Providing your team with the ability to upload malware samples for us to analyze, as well as access to “raw” log data in case you want to hunt alongside us.
- Enabling your team to have two-way conversations through the Pondurance Scope dashboard, providing you with an immediate and easy method to converse directly with our SOC team. Most providers only provide access via tickets.
We believe our risk-based strategy and approach to cybersecurity with our vCISO services and MyCyberScorecard, through our acquisition of Bearing Security, also sets us apart from other MDR providers.
Pondurance is specifically focused on addressing the cybersecurity needs of underserved SMB organizations. If you have limited investments in security technologies or lack the staff and skills to support a 24/7/365 SOC, we can provide comprehensive threat defense through our MDR services. If you’ve already made significant security investments in tools and people, we can partner with you to complement your current security operations.
Threat containment and mitigation: Providing our clients with an all-star defense to stop the opponent from scoring runs
We believe that the Gartner report reinforces the importance of another key service provided by Pondurance: Rapid, proactive response to detected threats. By combining automation and human expertise, we’re able to very quickly identify a threat and take action to mitigate even the most sophisticated cyberattacks.
An example of our ability to act quickly on a threat came recently with a manufacturing client. An employee at our client accidentally visited a fraudulent site and was served a malicious download for a fake Chrome update. The download created a remote backdoor for the attacker, who leveraged toolsets to dump credentials and attempted to move laterally within the environment. Our 24/7/365 SOC team detected the initial access and took immediate action, reporting the malicious activity to the client’s security team and isolating the compromised endpoint before the attacker could take further action.
Get a jump on the ‘22 draft: Stack your lineup today
You may have seen this quote from Gartner before: “By 2025, 50% of organizations will be using MDR services for threat monitoring, detection and response functions that offer threat containment and mitigation capabilities.”
Why wait to add your organization to the ranks of those using MDR services? The time is now—not 2024 or 2025—to begin putting MDR to work protecting your organization. Small to mid-sized businesses have oversized targets on their backs, often because they just don’t have the staff or budget to invest in cybersecurity the way large enterprises do. Bad actors never take a break, so organizations without the proper security controls in place are on borrowed time. Pondurance can help you stack your lineup by providing you with affordable enterprise-class MDR and DFIR services, staffed by a team of some of the best threat hunters in the world.
If you use the Gartner Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services to evaluate MDR providers, we believe you’ll find that Pondurance hits a home run, offering all of the key capabilities organizations need to detect, respond, contain and mitigate threats. Request a demo to learn more and be sure to download a complimentary copy of the report.
1 Gartner, Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services, by Pete Shoard, Craig Lawson, Mitchell Schneider, John Collins, Mark Wah, Andrew Davies, 25 October 2021.
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Gartner Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services, Pete Shoard, Craig Lawson, Mitchell Schneider, John Collins, Mark Wah, Andrew Davies, 25 October 2021.
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