August 29, 2025 3 Minute Read

Trustwave, A LevelBlue Company, regularly writes about Managed Detection and Response (MDR) covering every aspect of our solution, the partners we work with, what industry analysts think, but sometimes it’s good to circle back and cover the basics.

We’ll do that today breaking down what MDR is and why you need it.

The number of threat actors and cyber threats are not likely to decrease any time soon, or even far down the road. To battle this problem, organizations equip themselves with various security tools and solutions to help stay safe, but what they are receiving instead of peace of mind is a flood of security alerts.

While essential tools like Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) are a great first step, they often leave a critical gap and can cause more issues than they solve, such as the aforementioned alert tsunami.

This is where MDR providers come in.

An MDR security service can address this gap by combining cutting-edge technology with human expertise to provide 24/7 threat monitoring, hunting, and response. It's a key reason why Gartner estimates that 50% of organizations will be using MDR services by 2025.

What's Driving the Demand for MDR?

The need for an MDR service is a direct response to two major challenges facing organizations today: a deluge of threats and a critical cybersecurity talent shortage.

Based on the FBI's most recent Internet Crime Report (2024), the four biggest cybersecurity risks, in terms of reported financial losses, are:

• Investment Fraud: This category, which often involves cryptocurrency, was by far the costliest type of cybercrime, with victims reporting over $6.5 billion in losses.
• Business Email Compromise (BEC): BEC scams, which target businesses and individuals who conduct wire transfers, resulted in billions of dollars in losses.
• Tech Support Fraud: This involves criminals posing as technical support to trick victims into paying for fake services or granting remote access to their computers.
• Ransomware: While investment fraud accounted for the highest financial losses overall, ransomware remains a significant threat, especially to critical infrastructure sectors, with the number of complaints increasing.

The Cybersecurity Talent Gap

The global cybersecurity industry is currently facing a significant and persistent shortage of skilled professionals.

Global Shortage Statistics:

• Unfilled Jobs: The global cybersecurity workforce gap is estimated to be around 4 to 4.8 million unfilled jobs, according to the World Economic Forum. This figure represents the number of additional professionals needed to effectively secure organizations worldwide.
• Growing Gap: The shortage is not only large but also growing. Recent reports indicate that while the cybersecurity workforce is expanding, the demand is increasing at an even faster rate.
• Regional Disparities: The shortage is not uniform across the globe. According to the cybersecurity training site Programs, Asia-Pacific has the largest regional workforce gap at around 3.4 million people. South Korea has seen the biggest annual increase in the cybersecurity workforce gap, almost doubling from around 16,000 to approximately 31,000. Meanwhile, Brazil has seen a 7.5% decrease in the cybersecurity workforce gap, bringing down Latin America’s total by 5.7%.

How MDR Helps

MDR services provide a solution to these challenges by essentially acting as an extension of your security team. An effective MDR provider will:

1. Work with Your Existing Tools: A good MDR service integrates with your current security infrastructure, including your EDR, SIEM, and SOAR platforms.
2. Ingest and Correlate Data: The provider ingests telemetry from across your entire environment, including complex hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure. This allows them to correlate alerts from various sources, providing a holistic view of your attack surface.
3. Eliminate False Positives: By combining powerful analytics with the expertise of human analysts, the MDR provider can investigate and eliminate the vast majority of false-positive alerts, leaving only confirmed threats that require immediate action.
4. Provide Rapid Response: Once a confirmed threat is identified, a top-tier MDR provider will not only notify you but can also take immediate incident response actions on your behalf, based on pre-defined protocols. This is a crucial step that goes beyond traditional managed security services (MSS) and ensures that you can respond to an alert, even at 3 a.m. on a Saturday, without needing to maintain your own 24/7 team.

The Trustwave MDR Approach

Trustwave starts with 24x7 detection and response, our elite team of SpiderLabs cyber experts are actively and continuously tracking sophisticated threats and threat groups to dissect the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) these groups use to help us fortify your defenses.

The cumulative knowledge from ongoing threat research, global client engagements, and curated threat intelligence is seamlessly integrated into the Trustwave MDR service to protect your organization from the latest cyberthreats—coming from inside or outside your organization.

Moreover, unlike many other MDR providers, Trustwave has a comprehensive portfolio of cyber experts and services ready to take your cybersecurity program to the next level.

Rapid Time-to-Value

• No one in industry is faster to value
• Seconds to ingest data, outcomes produced in 10 min or less
• Onboard in less than 10 days, the right way.

Faster Response Times

• No one in the industry responds faster
• Personalized MTTR of less than 30 minutes
• Client-defined response protocol fully integrated into SOC workflows and platform.

Unrivaled Threat Intelligence

• Billions of records in global threat intelligence database
• Only provider with 6 Global Cyber Threat Research Centers
• Decades of threat intelligence leadership and a team prolific in finding threats and vulnerabilities

Dedicated Cyber Success Team

• A dedicated named resource with you for the life of the service
• We detect what others can’t with intimate knowledge of your environment for better tuning, faster and more efficient response

Best-of-Breed Partnerships

We’re committed to connecting your hybrid multi-cloud operations to help you realize greater value from your existing security investments, together with our partners.

• Trustwave MDR for Microsoft Defender
• Trustwave MDR for Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR
• 70+ API integrations, bi-directional