As an IT director, you want the best security possible for your organization. The promise of 24/7 managed detection and response (MDR) services can seem appealing. Who wouldn’t want dedicated security analysts watching your systems around the clock? But before outsourcing your security to an MDR provider, consider how this approach might actually leave you more vulnerable than you realize.
When evaluating MDR services, many IT leaders discover concerning limitations:
While MDR providers promise rapid response, the reality is often quite different. With junior-level analysts juggling multiple clients and drowning in alerts, response times frequently stretch to 60 minutes or more just to begin analysis. By comparison, automated detection can alert you within seconds, allowing immediate action. In those critical moments when MDR analysts are still triaging alerts, attackers can already be expanding their reach through your network.
Many MDR services restrict your access to security data and logging, forcing you to go through their analysts for basic information about your own environment. This creates unnecessary friction when you need to investigate issues or demonstrate compliance. Even worse, limited MDR logging means less correlation between events, creating dangerous blind spots attackers can exploit.
Instead of being able to take immediate action when threats arise, you're dependent on an MDR analyst who may not understand your environment's specific needs and context. Here's the reality of what happens:
1. The MDR alerts you to a potential threat3. Only after you provide this information can they suggest next steps.
4. You then still have to implement the actual fixes!
The result? You're doing the same investigation and remediation work you'd do anyway - it's just delayed by waiting for the MDR's involvement. This disconnect not only slows response times, but can lead to missed threats and incomplete remediation.
The experiences of organizations that have moved away from MDR services tell a compelling story. Take Paul Silvestri, IT Manager at Girl Scouts of Southeastern Michigan. Within 36 hours of deploying Blumira's platform, Paul received an early morning alert within seconds of suspicious email forwarding rules on a C-level executive's account. Because he had direct access to the security data and clear response guidance, Paul immediately:
"I'm able to resolve [issues] faster than finding out about it and playing defense," explains Paul. "I get an alert? I go right on offense. I deal with it instead of finding out several days later that something has happened."
This experience is echoed by Aaron Cervasio, CISO at Connect Cause, who switched from an MDR provider to gain better visibility and control.
"With Blumira, we got alerts on a customer with plaintext password documents in their environment that [our previous MDR] never alerted us to. It was crickets – we heard nothing from them, ever. If we're going to be an MSP with expertise, we can't rely on some random third-party SOC to interpret this information on our behalf. We have to look at the event and determine if it's actionable or not."
Both organizations discovered that direct access to security data and automated alerts led to faster, more effective threat response than waiting for an MDR service to notice and react to issues.
Today's threats move too quickly to wait for an outside analyst to review alerts and decide on action. You need:
When you maintain control of your security operations with the right automated support:
As Paul from Girl Scouts discovered: "I can sleep a lot better at night knowing that things are more secure than they were before. Blumira makes things easier for me because I have that single pane of glass that basically tells me there are 565 million logs being reviewed."
When security incidents occur, MDR services typically provide one of two things: either generic response playbooks or instructions from an analyst who may not fully understand your environment. Both approaches have serious limitations.
Static playbooks can't account for the unique aspects of your environment or the specific nature of each threat. And waiting for an MDR analyst to review the situation and provide guidance means valuable time lost. Plus, that analyst may lack crucial context about your systems and operations, and is busy juggling your alerts with those of all their other clients.
This is where Blumira's approach fundamentally differs. Rather than providing generic checklists or making you wait for analyst instructions, our platform includes an adaptive response intelligence system that:
Before committing to an MDR service, ask yourself:
Rather than outsourcing your security to an MDR provider and still being responsible for doing all of the legwork yourself, consider a modern approach.
This approach gives you the empowerment and visibility you need, while ensuring you have strong security that moves at the speed of modern threats. Want more visibility? Check out Blumira's Domain Security Assessment tool.
Want to see the difference speed makes in security response? Schedule a demo to discover how you can respond to threats in minutes instead of waiting hours for MDR analysis. Learn how Blumira helps you achieve better security outcomes while maintaining direct ownership of your environment.