2023 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass Report: Managed Detection & Response Services

KuppingerCole has named Kroll as an Overall Leader in its latest analysis of the Managed Detection & Response services market. 

The KuppingerCole Leadership Compass provides an overview of the market for managed detection and response (MDR) services that manage a collection of cybersecurity technologies to provide advanced cyber threat detection and response capabilities, including Security Operations Center as a Service (SOCaaS) offerings.

Source: 2023 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass: Managed Detection & Response Services. The Overall Leaders in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

In previous Market Compass reports, KuppingerCole focused on SOCaaS as a discrete market emerging due to the evolution of MDR solutions by including coverage of all cloud environments being built on cloud-based platforms and including the services and guidance of human analysts. However, as many standard MDR solutions now have these characteristics, SOCaaS vendors are included in this in-depth Leadership Compass analysis of the broader MDR market. It is from this perspective that KuppingerCole has identified Kroll as a leading MDR provider, alongside just seven other MDR vendors selected from the across the whole MDR market.

Demand for MDR Services Continues to Grow

The Leadership Compass report highlights that rising cyber threats, alert overload and the global worldwide shortage of cybersecurity skills are among the key drivers for the ongoing growth of the MDR market. From the rapidly increasing adoption of cloud services to increased cyber espionage, the report discusses the reasons behind so many organizations adopting MDR, and why even more are currently considering it.

Organizations are increasingly recognizing that no level of technology investment will provide 100% protection against threats due to the volume and complexity of current security challenges that have become too great for internal security teams to manage. Evidence of the increased demand for MDR solutions can be seen in the rapid growth in the market, with most vendors reporting a significant increase in sales.

The report also revealed that the MDR market continues to evolve towards a model where providers are now actively taking on more responsibilities (e.g., threat detection, triage, containment, recovery and remediation), in partnership with customer cybersecurity and IT teams.

Providers are also increasingly managing EDR and providing Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR)-as-a-Service to reduce the burden of managing these complex systems. Alongside the high volume of vendors in the marketplace, this diversification means that organizations must be careful to ensure that they make the right choice of MDR provider for their requirements.

Defining Today’s MDR Leaders: Report Methodology

In its report, KuppingerCole identified Overall Leaders based on a combined rating which analyzes the strength of products, market presence and the innovation of vendors, selecting those assessed as being above average overall:

Product Leadership
Kroll is one of five vendors leading the field with the most comprehensive offerings, with KuppingerCole recognizing the impact of Kroll Responder, our MDR solution which provides complete response. Defined in this context as Service Leadership, this category considers the functional strength and completeness of services. It identifies mature, leading-edge products that deliver most of the capabilities KuppingerCole expects in that market segment.

Innovation Leadership
Kroll has been named as one of nine leaders in MDR innovation. KuppingerCole defines innovation in MDR as characterized by aspects such as continual expansion of automated capabilities, the inclusion of user and attacker behavior analytics, the use of machine learning and deep learning, and global context based on customer events. Innovation Leaders are the vendors actively driving innovation in the market segment. They provide several of the most innovative and cutting-edge features that KuppingerCole hopes to see in the market segment.

Source: 2023 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass: Managed Detection & Response services.

Kroll Named as a Technology Leader

The report also recognizes Kroll as a Technology Leader from among six MDR vendors. This matrix illustrates the correlation between Product Leadership and Innovation Leadership. KuppingerCole comments of Innovation leaders in this context as a whole, “It is clear that technological innovation drives product success, which means there is typically a close relationship between innovation and product strength.”

Source: 2023 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass: Managed Detection & Response services. The Product/Innovation Matrix for Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

From Cloud-First to Wide-Ranging Detection Coverage: Kroll’s Key Strengths

Source: 2023 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass: Managed Detection & Response Services Product/Vendor evaluation, specific capabilities for the market segment

As an Overall Leader in the MDR market, Kroll’s strengths are identified in the report as:

• Cloud-first approach with rapid deployment
• Flexible deployment options
• Good MDR coverage of cloud computing environments
• Wide range of detection coverage and capabilities
• Good response capabilities, including post-remediation and forensic support
• Provides Kroll incident responders for major incidents to retore business operations
• Wide range of automatic containment actions
• A large number of threat intelligence sources
• Supports detection and response to insider threats
• Mobile app to support cyber defenders wherever they are

The KuppingerCole Leadership Compass: Managed Detection & Response Services is available for download on this page.

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