Bitdefender Recognized by Forrester Research as a Notable Provider in MDR

The managed detection and response (MDR) market is a complex one. As organizations of all sizes face increased online threats and a persistent workforce shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals, many are turning to MDR services to augment and support their existing security programs or serve as their frontline defense. Numerous vendors have entered the space, packaging together technologies and services to varying degrees and calling it MDR.

The new MDR Landscape report by Forrester breaks down the market for organizations and their buyers. By identifying 15 capabilities that are most essential for both core and extended MDR business scenarios, Forrester maps relevant business requirements like detection, response, EDR agent support, MITRE ATT&CK mapping, threat modeling/threat profiles, and more to help guide buyers as they evaluate MDR providers.

What is MDR?

According to the report, “Managed detection and response services begin with endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools and augment that data with telemetry from network, identity, cloud, APIs, applications, and other log sources to produce high-fidelity detections, conduct investigations, provide remote incident response support, enable security automation, and initiate threat hunts to identify adversaries that circumvented security controls. Security and Risk (S&R) professionals use MDR providers to obtain 24/7 monitoring of their security events, augment the expertise of their existing SOC analysts, provide stability when personnel depart the organization, assist with or perform response actions, and offer assurance that sophisticated adversaries are not in the environment through threat hunting.”

Bitdefender MDR, recognized by Forrester as a Notable Provider, is backed by an elite team of cybersecurity experts and powered by the advanced detection and response capabilities of our GravityZone Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platform. By combining data feeds and telemetry from endpoints, networks, clouds, identities and productivity applications with actionable security analytics and our 24x7, fully staffed security operations center (SOC), Bitdefender MDR provides industry-leading protection, detection and response for organizations of any size, across their entire environment.

Core business scenarios for MDR

The report dives deep into not only the key trends in the MDR industry today, but also the evolution of the market and where it is headed. According to Forrester, the core business scenarios for the MDR market are: 1) threat detection, 2) extended detection, 3) threat hunting, and 4) security orchestration and automated response (SOAR). The report also notes that MDR providers will spend the near future solving some of the most important client issues that have emerged in recent years: response, automation and the experiences of SOC analysts.

At Bitdefender, we know that as organizations extend their detection capabilities and increase their telemetry sources, they can struggle with the challenge of too much data, too many alerts, and too much noise. Security professionals and SOC analysts can quickly become overwhelmed. That’s why our solutions and services are designed with the analyst experience in mind. Contextual alerts provide a fuller picture of an organization’s environment, helping teams make more informed decisions and perform root cause analysis to understand what led to a compromise and fix the vulnerability. Our team of experienced cyber practitioners provide proactive threat hunting for faster detection and response, reducing attacker dwell time and stopping threats before they spread. Automated response capabilities help stop attacks through pre-approved actions executed by our SOC analysts. We work with our MDR customers during onboarding and afterwards to define actions our analysts can take to rapidly mitigate incidents without impacting our customers’ teams. This approach helps streamline security operations for our clients in a way that is affordable, easy to implement, and scales based on their business needs.

Advanced analytics

In the report, analytics is identified as one of the extended business scenarios that buyers are looking to address when evaluating MDR services. It notes that container and workload detection and multiple endpoint detection and response (EDR) agent support are key differentiators for this business scenario. Bitdefender is recognized in the report among vendors addressing this scenario.

At Bitdefender, we believe our advanced risk analytics technology sets us apart from other MDR services. Our risk analytics technology examines not only endpoints but also human behavior, continuously analyzing an organization’s risk using hundreds of factors to identify, prioritize and provide guidance on mitigating user, network, and endpoint risks. It detects and identifies anomalous or unauthorized activity across disparate log sources to help our threat hunters and SOC analysts determine whether an anomaly is truly a threat, or simply an unusual but harmless behavior. Moreover, with the open and native GravityZone XDR platform serving as the foundation for our service, Bitdefender MDR extends visibility, detection and response beyond traditional endpoints to include cloud workloads, containers, identities, networks, applications and more – all centralized in a single, actionable view.

Driving continuous innovation in MDR

Bitdefender continues to innovate the MDR market. To address the security challenges presented by digital transformation and the continuing shift towards cloud environments, we recently introduced a new service called MDR Foundations. MDR Foundations is designed to provide MDR capabilities specifically tailored to managed service providers (MSPs) and customer organizations with limited resources.

Unlike many competing MDR offerings which are simply managed anti-virus or managed endpoint detection and response (EDR), MDR Foundations provides any size business a full managed detection and response security service. MDR Foundations improves defense and response to threats by enabling MSPs and customers to work side-by-side with Bitdefender security analysts. A dedicated MDR portal allows clients to connect and communicate with their Bitdefender team 24x7, view alerts, manage endpoints and take recommended actions to contain or eliminate threats all from a single dashboard.