Current data on the threat landscape of North America shows the need for a comprehensive and proactive approach to security. A traditional approach would be to build a threat response team. However, to be effective against current threats, a threat response team needs to have a considerable amount of skills, time, and resources, which may not be feasible for some organizations. This is only exacerbated by the daily tasks associated with keeping the business up and running. If treated as just a part of the broader job of regular IT staff, threat management can prove overwhelming, as it includes vulnerability assessment, patching, firmware upgrades, vendor management, intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS) and firewall monitoring, and other specialized focus areas. And even if enterprises were willing to allot people to react to security incidents, the sheer volume of events and the time-consuming tasks of prioritizing and analyzing them often prove too much to handle.

These could be handled better by security professionals especially focused on threats — an advantage that managed detection and response (MDR) can bring to organizations. MDR provides advanced threat hunting services, faster alert prioritization, root cause analysis, detailed research, and a remediation plan that empowers organizations with better ability to respond to sophisticated attacks, examples of which have been found throughout North America for the second quarter of 2018.