Smarter MDR: Insights into Better Protection for Your Business

June 05, 2025

Managed detection and response (MDR) is rapidly becoming an essential component of modern cybersecurity strategies. But with evolving threats, expanding tech stacks and constrained resources, implementing MDR isn’t always straightforward. Organizations are facing these challenges, all while trying to manage increasingly complex environments. So, what does it really take to implement an MDR solution that works?

Prefer to watch? Find this discussion on smarter MDR, featuring Optiv’s John Pelton and Marty McDonald, by visiting the link below.

Smarter MDR: A Roadmap to Better Protection For Your Business

Start with a Solid Foundation

Before even considering vendors or solutions, organizations need to focus on building a strong security posture from the ground up. This starts with a shift in mindset, from reactive to proactive. One of the most important aspects here is actionable threat intelligence.

Threat intelligence isn’t just about collecting as many data feeds as possible. It’s about curating intelligence that’s relevant to your organization’s industry, geography and vulnerabilities. A good MDR solution should ingest this information, correlate it and make it operational — giving security teams insight not just into what happened, but who’s behind the activity and what they’re likely to do next.

Go Beyond the Endpoint

While endpoint detection and response (EDR) is a staple in any MDR stack, organizations should be thinking bigger. Once a threat actor bypasses perimeter defenses, the ability to detect lateral movement through network detection and response (NDR) becomes critical. MDR must include forensic capabilities, provide a full network picture and support defense in depth strategies.

Modern threats don’t stick to one vector, and neither should your visibility. A mature MDR solution should cover endpoints, networks and everything in between, providing analysts with the insight they need to detect and respond effectively.

Understand Your Needs and Your Tools

Knowing your maturity level is key before diving into MDR. Understand what your current team is capable of and what your tools are doing, so that MDR can fill gaps rather than create redundancies.

A well-integrated MDR solution should enhance what you already have. If a provider is asking you to rip out your EDR, your perimeter controls or your identity management tools to adopt their stack, that’s a red flag. Good MDR should be additive, not disruptive.

Risk tolerance also matters. Your provider should tailor detection and alerting strategies to your appetite for risk, tuning the service accordingly. Likewise, understanding what logs are useful for security versus compliance purposes will help you manage costs and avoid unnecessary data ingestion charges.

Beware the AI Buzzwords

Nearly every vendor these days claims to be using AI or machine learning to transform cybersecurity. But buyers need to dig deeper. Is AI being used to automate human workflows, like summarizing data or generating queries? Or is it a black box that claims to eliminate false positives altogether?

We’re not quite at the point where AI can manage threat detection without human oversight. Transparency is crucial. Organizations should be asking their MDR provider how AI is implemented, what models are being used, and how much visibility clients have into the decision-making process.

Look for Advanced Capabilities

Basic MDR solutions offer alerting and response. But the best ones do much more. Look for integrations with vulnerability management and contextual asset data. When an alert fires, analysts should have instant answers: Is this host vulnerable? Who owns the asset? What’s the business impact of taking it offline?

This kind of real-time enrichment allows for smarter prioritization. Rather than chasing every CVE with a high severity score, organizations can focus on vulnerabilities that attackers are actively targeting in their environment.

The enrichment conversation also includes asset ownership, potential compensating controls and business impact. The more you know about an alert, the faster and smarter your response can be.

Control Costs with Smarter Data Management

Many organizations are surprised by just how expensive logging can get. It’s common to start small (say, 500 GB/day), and end up with three times the volume within a few months. That’s a huge cost spike, especially with cloud-based SIEM providers.

To avoid this, look for MDR providers that support smart data pipelining. This allows you to separate data into what’s useful for detection versus what’s needed for compliance. You can then send the compliance data to cheap storage options like S3 or Azure Blobs while keeping security-critical data in your MDR platform.

Having a secondary storage location is also important. It buys you that cost reduction, but it also buys you that ability to switch tools in the future if necessary while still maintaining the compliance that you need with those logs.

Think About the Future

Cybersecurity isn’t static, and neither is your organization. As threats evolve and your environment changes, your MDR strategy needs to scale with you. One of the biggest hurdles many organizations face is the disconnect between IT and security operations. MDR outputs need to inform IT remediation efforts without creating unnecessary friction.

Additionally, your MDR provider should integrate with your case management tools and existing security stack. That includes updating alerts, closing cases in tools like Defender or CrowdStrike, and feeding enriched metadata back into machine learning models. If your tools don’t talk to each other, you’ll struggle to get a full picture of your environment.

MDR as a Partnership

More than anything, MDR isn’t a product you buy once and forget. It’s a service, and it works best when there’s a partnership. Your provider is going to send alerts your way. You need a plan for what to do with them. That might mean creating a virtual SOC or setting up clear responsibilities across your team.

Security tools still rely on humans to ask, “Is this normal?” and follow their curiosity. No platform can replace that yet. That’s why it's essential to invest in your team, giving them time to learn and specialize. Let the MDR provider handle the alerts, while your internal team focuses on engineering a resilient environment.

Differentiators That Matter

In a competitive MDR market, look for three things: transparency, flexibility and deep integration. You should be able to access and search your data. The provider should help manage it cost-effectively. And they should work with your existing tools, not force you to start from scratch.

Lastly, true MDR goes beyond detection. It includes response. Whether it’s isolating a user, cutting off a machine or stopping insider threats, your provider should be able to act when needed.

At the end of the day, MDR is about more than technology. It’s about aligning people, processes and platforms to detect, understand and respond to threats — today and tomorrow.

For questions about how your organization can experience smarter, more effective detection and response, reach out to an Optiv expert.