Palo Alto Networks announced this week the immediate availability of Unit 42 Managed Detection and Response (MDR), a service that enables on-the-fly cybersecurity professionals to track and respond to security threats in real time.
The idea is to support Palo Alto’s existing automated Cortex Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platform with human expertise to dedicate the company’s threat response team and other members to minimizing unnecessary alerts and prioritizing critical threats. . The company said in a statement that this is in response to an increasingly sophisticated and complex threat landscape. It is also a response to an in-house security environment that is not mature enough to respond in many cases.
Palo Alto’s senior vice president Wendi Whitmore said in a statement that what makes security a particularly challenging problem for many organizations is the lack of advanced expertise.
“As cyberattacks continue to increase, many organizations have to deal with advanced threats with limited resources without adequate expertise and without adequate expertise,” she said. “It will not lead to good results.”
Unit42 MDR provides continuous monitoring
A key part of the offering is continuous monitoring and response. Palo Alto’s experts use the company’s in-house processes and infrastructure to detect and respond to potential threats faster and more accurately, around the clock for events and alerts.
Palo Alto also offers a feature called Proactive Threat Hunting as part of its Unit 42 MDR service. In other words, it leverages the institutional knowledge of the security firm and XDR technology to examine the client environment for complex threats. Finally, Unit 42 also conducts regular on-site inspections of clients based on recommendations for changes in security posture and policies, based on the company’s expertise in attack prevention.
According to Gartner’s latest market reports and technical definitions, XDR provides integrated analytics and seamless operations, firewall connectivity, endpoint protection, network intrusion prevention, secure email, and more.
According to Gartner’s report, the market is relatively immature and risks vendor lock-in. There is no risk in having one company oversee the overall security posture of a business. However, the analytics firm believes in more effective and integrated threat response systems, in part due to exactly the same factors that Palo Alto cited when he published Unit 42: the difficulty of finding and retaining in-house security talent and of integrating protection methods against a variety of modern threats. difficulty .
“Mainstream organizations are often overwhelmed by the intersection of these two issues,” the report said.
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