24/7 Threat Detection and Response, Without Building a SOC

Most Breaches Are Detected Too Late

The median time for a UK business to detect a breach is still 197 days. That is over six months of an attacker sitting inside your network, moving laterally, escalating privileges, and exfiltrating data before anyone notices.

The reason is straightforward: most businesses rely on preventive tools — firewalls, antivirus, email filters — but have nobody actively watching for the attacks that get through. And attacks do get through. Every perimeter has gaps. Every user makes mistakes. Every piece of software has vulnerabilities.

Managed detection and response closes that gap with continuous monitoring, proactive threat hunting, and rapid incident response. It works alongside cybersecurity services to create a complete defence posture.

What MDR Actually Provides

SOC as a service means a team of security analysts monitoring your environment around the clock. They are not just watching dashboards. They are actively hunting for indicators of compromise, investigating anomalous behaviour, and correlating events across your endpoints, network, cloud platforms, and identity systems.

When our analysts detect a confirmed threat, they act immediately. If malware is executing on an endpoint, we isolate that device from the network within minutes — automatically if the threat is clear-cut, with analyst approval for more nuanced situations. If an account shows signs of compromise, we disable it and initiate investigation.

This is not a case of receiving an alert email the next morning. Our average detection-to-containment time is 11 minutes. For a ransomware attack, as we detail in our ransomware threat landscape guide, that difference between 11 minutes and 11 hours is the difference between one isolated machine and an encrypted network.

Beyond Alerts: Proactive Threat Hunting

Automated detection catches known patterns. But sophisticated attackers deliberately avoid known signatures. They use legitimate tools already installed on your systems, move slowly to blend with normal traffic, and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities that no rule has been written for yet.

Our threat hunters proactively search for these stealthy intrusions. They analyse behavioural patterns, look for lateral movement indicators, investigate unusual authentication activity, and correlate weak signals that individually look benign but together indicate compromise. This human layer is what separates MDR from a tool that sends alert emails.

MDR, EDR, SIEM, SOC: What the Acronyms Actually Mean

This is the most confused corner of the security market, and vendors do not work hard to clear it up. The distinction matters because buying the wrong layer leaves you with tooling nobody is watching.

	What it is	Who operates it	What it does not do
EDR	Software on endpoints that detects and can isolate malicious behaviour	You	Nothing outside the endpoint; nobody watches the alerts
SIEM	A platform that collects and correlates logs from everything	You	Detects nothing on its own; needs rules, tuning and analysts
SOC	A team of analysts, in-house or outsourced	You or a provider	Costs a minimum of three FTE to run 24/7 in-house
MDR	EDR + log analytics + a 24/7 analyst team + authority to act	Provider	Not a replacement for backups, patching or email filtering
MSSP	Traditionally alert forwarding and device management	Provider	Classically does not respond — it tells you to

The practical difference between MDR and an older MSSP model is authority. An MSSP typically sends you an alert. MDR contains the threat and tells you afterwards. If a provider cannot isolate a host at 3am without waiting for your approval, you are buying monitoring, not response.

What MDR Costs

MDR is priced per endpoint or per user, per month, and the range in the UK mid-market is wide because the term is applied loosely.

• Entry / tool-led MDR: £6–£12 per endpoint/month. Usually a single vendor’s EDR with a shared analyst pool.
• Full MDR with log ingestion: £15–£30 per endpoint/month. Includes identity, cloud and email telemetry, not just endpoints.
• In-house 24/7 SOC: realistically £350,000+ per year in salary alone. Genuine round-the-clock cover needs 5–6 analysts, not 3.

For a 50-person firm, full MDR typically lands between £900 and £1,800 per month. Compare that with the cost of a single ransomware incident — and note that most cyber insurers now price MDR into their premiums, so part of the cost is recovered through reduced insurance.

Questions to Ask Any MDR Provider

Five questions separate genuine MDR from relabelled alert forwarding:

1. “Will you isolate a compromised host without calling me first?” If no, it is monitoring. Get the pre-authorised action list in writing.
2. “Is your SOC staffed by analysts at 3am on a Sunday, or is it follow-the-sun with a skeleton shift?” Ask where the analysts physically are.
3. “What telemetry do you ingest beyond endpoints?” Identity (Entra ID) and email are where modern attacks actually start. Endpoint-only MDR misses business email compromise almost entirely.
4. “What is your contractual mean time to respond, and what happens if you miss it?” An SLA with no remedy is a marketing number.
5. “Who owns the data if we leave?” Log retention and portability matter for both investigations and regulators.

What MDR Does Not Cover

Worth stating plainly, because over-selling this service is common. MDR detects and responds to intrusions. It does not:

• Replace backups. If ransomware detonates, recovery still depends on tested, immutable backups.
• Patch your systems. Detection is not remediation of the underlying vulnerability.
• Stop the phishing email arriving. That is email security and awareness training.
• Fix identity architecture. If everyone is a domain admin, MDR will detect the compromise faster and still have to watch it spread.

MDR is the layer that assumes the others will occasionally fail. It is not a substitute for them.

Built for Regulated Firms

For financial services companies in London, MDR is increasingly not optional. FCA operational resilience requirements expect firms to demonstrate they can detect and respond to cyber incidents quickly. DORA mandates continuous monitoring and incident classification capabilities. Our managed detection response service satisfies these requirements and generates the evidence your compliance team needs.

We provide monthly threat intelligence briefings tailored to the financial services sector, including hedge funds and wealth managers, covering emerging attack techniques, sector-specific campaigns, and recommendations for strengthening your defences. You stay informed without having to track the threat landscape yourself.