2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services

The latest Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Services from Gartner dives into the continued growth of the MDR industry and highlights the importance of human-led threat detection and response, context-driven insights, and increased demand for providers to actively disrupt and contain threats on customers’ behalf. 

Some key findings and recommendations of the Managed Detection and Response Gartner Market Guide include:

• Misnamed technology-centric offerings and vendor-delivered service wrappers (VDSW), that fail to deliver human-driven managed detection and response (MDR) services, are causing challenges for buyers looking to identify and select an outcome-driven provider.
• Turnkey threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR) capabilities are a core requirement for buyers of MDR services who demand remotely delivered services deployed quickly and predictably.
• MDR buyers must focus on the ability to provide context-driven insights that will directly impact their business objectives, as wide-scale collection of telemetry and automated analysis are insufficient when facing uncommon threats.
• An increasing number of MDR customers demand that providers are able to remotely initiate measures for active containment or disruption of a threat, yet vendor autonomy still varies. Factors including: trust, geography and the security maturity of the consuming organisation affect adoption.

As a security and risk management leader responsible for security operations, you should:

• Use MDR services to obtain 24/7, remotely delivered, human-led security operations capabilities when there are no existing internal capabilities, or when the organisation needs to accelerate or augment existing security operations capabilities.
• Assess how the MDR provider’s containment approach and incident reporting can integrate with your organisation and whether actions can be performed on your behalf to align with business requirements as well as compliance/legal policy/government regulation.
• Attain the maximum benefit from MDR services by preparing response workflow processes and integrating existing ticket management systems to ensure a business-centric response.
• Investigate whether the MDR provider’s service is able to align with your business-driven requirements and provide actionable findings that internal teams can successfully react to, rather than settling for regurgitated technology outputs with no added analysis.

1. Gartner, Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services, By Pete Shoard, Al Price, Mitchell Schneider, Craig Lawson, Andrew Davies, 14 February 2023
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