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With enterprise adoption of MDR accelerating in response to the increasing volume and sophistication of cyberthreats, a growing number of enterprises are choosing MDR providers that promise a more aggressive and proactive response to threats upon detection. As the Gartner report notes, “MDR customers are increasingly looking for vendors that will initiate measures for active containment or disruption of a threat. This is now a core requirement for buyers when selecting a provider.” 

“While containing threats early is certainly vital, it must be done without negatively impacting customers’ business operations. You can’t protect what you don’t understand, which is why MDR providers must build a deep understanding of their customers’ environments, from assessing their critical assets to identifying key dependencies that could impact operations,” said Tom Corn, chief product officer (CPO) for Open Systems. “Recognizing this, our Open Systems MDR+ service leverages continuous assessment of our customers’ environments to identify areas of risk. The intelligence gathered during assessment informs the prevention techniques we employ, as well as our ability to detect and respond with precision. One key component to this model is the integration of data scientists and infrastructure experts focused on building our understanding of customer environments into Mission Control, our 24x7 security operation.”

In addition to reviewing the factors driving the MDR market, the Gartner report includes recommendations for companies evaluating MDR service providers, including:  
 
• Focus on outcomes, not technologies, for MDR buyers. Organizations underinvested in technologies like EDR and network detection and response (NDR) should favor an approach in which a vendor provides the tools and delivers the desired outcomes.
• Assess MDR services if buyers are lacking staff and expertise to handle incident response activities once a threat has been identified or want to add threat-hunting capabilities.
• Examine compatibility as a requirement if there are existing investments in threat detection technologies, such as EDR and SIEM, MDR services that only deploy their own technologies, as this may be costly and disruptive.
• Examine MSSPs if technology management, compliance monitoring and other managed security services are required — especially those that offer MDR-type services.
• Buy MDR services that offer transparency, encourage engagement through modern  user interfaces and have open communication channels with analysts and delivery  teams.
 
“Many of these points were key design principles driving the development of our MDR+ service, which focuses entirely on delivering outcomes. This includes designing the service to natively take advantage of the Microsoft security suite – including Sentinel and Defender – enabling customers to leverage their existing investments and reduce the number of controls and tools they need to manage. MDR+ is also designed to integrate into a customer’s existing operational model and to foster collaboration between the security teams and IT teams responsible for producing security outcomes,” Corn continued.
 
Gartner Recognition 
Open Systems has been included in several other Gartner reports, and was most recently listed as one of 40 Representative Vendors in the 2022 Gartner Market Guide for Managed Security Systems (MSS)2. Gartner also named Open Systems as a Representative Vendor in the Gartner Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services (MDR) in 20213 for the second year in a row. Open Systems was also cited in the 2021 Gartner® Best Security Practices for SD-WAN4 report.