Managed Detection & Response
Move from simply collecting security events to identifying, investigating and responding to suspicious activity.
Collecting events is the easy part. The difficulty is deciding which of them represents something happening, and then doing something about it quickly enough for the decision to matter.
MDR joins those two halves. Detection identifies activity worth attention; response turns that finding into a coordinated action. Either one alone tends to disappoint — detection without response produces a queue, response without detection arrives late.
Each stage narrows the volume and increases the confidence.
- EVENTEventRaw activity recorded from a monitored source
- DETECTIONDetectionActivity matching a detection condition is surfaced
- TRIAGETriageAssessed for whether it represents something real
- INVESTIGATIONInvestigationSupporting evidence gathered to establish scope
- RESPONSEResponseCoordinated action according to the agreed process
Conceptual pipeline. Which response actions are performed by us and which stay with your team is defined per engagement.
Detection without response is just a longer queue
It is common to find organizations with good telemetry, reasonable detection logic and no agreed path from a confirmed finding to an action. The investigation completes, a message goes to a channel, and the next step depends on who happens to be reading.
Response is a process question before it is a technical one: who can authorise an action, which actions are pre-approved, and what happens when the decision-maker is asleep.
Focus areas
Response actions available under an engagement depend on scope and on what your team authorises.
What detection and response looks like in operation.
When Does Detection Need a Response Attached?
Output your team can act on.
Which of these apply depends on engagement scope.
A clearer view of what activity is happening across the environment in scope.
What the monitored signals show over time, and what changed.
Activity identified as worth attention, with the reasoning behind it.
What was examined, what it indicated and what was ruled out.
A written account of an incident: timeline, impact and actions taken.
Recommended actions, and where a decision needs to sit with your team.
Where detection, logging or process could be strengthened.
The rest of the operations lifecycle.
Questions we get asked before an engagement.
They overlap heavily. The distinction is emphasis: a managed SOC centres on monitoring, triage and escalation, while MDR extends further into detection engineering and coordinated response. In practice the boundary is set by scope rather than by the label.
Only where that is explicitly agreed. Some organizations want a set of pre-approved containment actions; others want every action to stay with their team and expect us to recommend. Both work, provided the boundary is written down before an incident rather than during one.
Not as a prerequisite. The more useful starting question is what your current stack already produces and whether it is being used well. We would rather work with usable telemetry you already have than sell a migration you do not need.
Writing, testing and tuning the logic that decides what gets surfaced — informed by your environment, the activity you actually see, and what previous investigations showed. It is ongoing work, not a one-time configuration.
Explore MDR
Tell us what you are detecting today and what happens after a detection fires. The gap between those two is usually where MDR earns its place.