Managed Detection & Response (MDR)

Threat Researchers provide strategic threat intelligence (TI) by reverse-engineering emerging malware and tracking global threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).

Their role within MDR is proactive risk mitigation, transforming raw telemetry into the actionable intelligence required to harden your environment against threats.

Security Analysts provide continuous 24/7 tactical surveillance, triaging telemetry and alerts from SIEM, EDR, and NDR platforms to validate genuine threats.

They reduce noise and operationalise threat detection, shielding your team from alert fatigue and ensuring high-fidelity, verified security incidents receive the prioritisation they demand.

Threat Hunters proactively seek out threat actors by executing hypothesis-driven hunts across your systems. By searching for complex TTPs, they see beyond generic indicators of compromise (IOCs) to the evasive signals that indicate more advanced threats.

These hunters reduce threat actor dwell time and enable response earlier in the kill chain by identifying ‘low and slow’ lateral movement that would otherwise remain undetected.

Detection Engineers help to build and improve defensive architecture by coding and tuning custom detection logic to match the specific nuances of your digital footprint.

Their role within MDR is to improve detection precision, ensuring the effectiveness of your security measures evolves at the same velocity as your adversaries.

Security Automation Engineers improve operational speed and scale by orchestrating complex automation workflows across the detection lifecycle.

They provide strategic efficiency, designed to eliminate the manual overhead that leads to analyst burnout and ensuring containment actions take place at machine speed.

Our Incident Responders are crisis containment and recovery experts, designed to minimise the impact of incidents when they happen. Trained to perform under pressure, they provide hands-on-keyboard forensic investigations and root-cause analysis during live breaches.

By utilising focused countermeasures to isolate, remove, and eradicate threat actors, our IR team helps ensure business continuity, avert financial losses, and prevent re-entry.

Managed Detection & Response (MDR) removes the heavy investment needed to prevent threat actors from infiltrating and causing damage within your environment. It’s a service which combines industry-leading  24/7, human-led managed service that looks for, and responds to, threats already active in your environment. MDR is a ‘complete’ threat detection solution, perfect for teams who lack in-house expertise or the bandwidth to monitor alerts from their EDR/XDR platform.

Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR), Managed Detection & Response (MDR), and Extended Detection & Response (XDR) are all solutions which fulfil the need to monitor for, detect, and respond to threats. However, they each tackle this need separately, corresponding with different parts of the cyber kill chain, different threats, and different implementation needs.

EDR is a platform-based solution that prevents threats from entering your environment by identifying and blocking them at the endpoint (i.e., on workstations and servers). A growing number of EDR solutions offer the ability to tackle these threats with automated or 1-click remediation and rollback.

XDR expands EDR by searching for threats right across your environment, not just the endpoint. It does this by collecting and consolidating telemetry from multiple layers – endpoints, networks, cloud workloads, third-party applications – into a single, centralised platform. This provides your team with a holistic and structured view of activity, reducing false positives and improving detection speed.

MDR enhances EDR and XDR with a 24/7, human-led managed service that looks for, and responds to, threats already active in your environment. MDR is a ‘complete’ threat detection solution, perfect for teams who lack in-house expertise or the bandwidth to monitor alerts from their EDR/XDR platform.

SIEM, SOC, and MDR are distinct cybersecurity solutions which all support you to detect and respond to threats. Though they’re related, they are distinct:

SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) is a tool which collects, aggregates, and analyses logs from across your environment in real-time. By centralising different datapoints, it supports you to detect threats and investigate incidents faster, without gaps in visibility.

SOC (Security Operations Center) is a centralised unit which holds responsibility for threat detection, whether in-house or delivered through a partner. A SOC comprises:

• People: threat hunters, analysts, detection engineers
• Tools: SIEM, EDR/XDR, SOAR, and threat intelligence (TI) platforms, vulnerability management, identity and access management (IAM)
• Continuous monitoring & log management, alert ingestion & triage, threat hunting, incident respinse (IR) and remediation, TI integration

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) incorporates SIEM and SOC by combining them into a single, outcome-oriented service. MDR uses SIEM to unify and make sense of telemetry, while the SOC elements provide human-led, 24/7 proactive protection.

We selected Sophos as our core threat detection partner because of their ability to demonstrably and reliably protect customers from sophisticated threats:

• Verified 100% threat visibility: In the 2025 MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Evaluation, Sophos detected 100% of adversary behaviours across sophisticated attack scenarios. It earned the highest possible ‘Technique’ rating for 86 out of 90 sub-steps, proving its ability to provide deep context for every threat identified.
• Best-in-class user experience: Sophos was ranked the #1 overall MDR solution in the G2 Winter 2026 Reports, marking the 14th consecutive time it has been named a leader. Customers specifically awarded it the ‘Best Results’ and ‘Best Usability’, citing its ability to reduce the burden on in-house IT teams.
• Trusted by the market: Sophos protects over 600,000 customers worldwide, including more than 26,000 who use their MDR service. This huge customer base contributes to Sophos being the most-reviewed MDR profile on the market. In the 2026 Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’ reports, Sophos maintained a 4.9/5 overall rating

Sophos supports dozens of integrations to provide comprehensive monitoring, threat hunting and analysis, and incident response, across your diverse estate.

Core Integration Categories & Supported Systems:

• Endpoint: Microsoft Defender (Endpoint/Business), CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Trend Micro, BlackBerry (Cylance), Broadcom (Symantec)
• Firewall: Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Check Point, Cisco (Firepower/Meraki), Barracuda, SonicWall, WatchGuard, Sophos Firewall.
• Identity: Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD), Okta, Cisco Duo, Auth0, Ping Identity, ManageEngine
• Cloud: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Orca Security
• Email: Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Mimecast, Proofpoint.
• Network: Darktrace, Cisco Umbrella, Zscaler, Vectra AI, ExtraHop, Thinkst Canary
• Backup & Storage: Veeam, Acronis, Rubrik