MDR and EDR are extremely common acronyms in the cybersecurity world. As you’ll learn, MDR and EDR are different, but together, they can create a powerful solution providing the breadth and depth in both coverage and detection capabilities. This blog will help you compare the two security solutions so you can better understand how they interact to improve your security.

What’s the Difference Between EDR and MDR?

There are key differences between EDR and MDR. Knowing them will help you understand their value and how they complement each other in enabling a hardened security posture, if properly integrated.

EDR is software

EDR stands for endpoint detection and response. It’s a software that focuses on the detection of and incident response to cyber threats on the endpoint (servers, laptops, mobile devices, virtual environments, etc.). EDR can do threat detection, prevention, and even give you the ability to quarantine compromised assets. It’s also a great tool for getting to root cause. With all the data collected before, during, and after an attack, analysts can get surgical with their root cause analysis.

[Related Reading: What Is Endpoint Detection and Response?]

MDR is a service

MDR stands for managed detection and response. It’s a managed service that continuously monitors, prioritizes, and responds to cyber threats with humans behind the wheel. MDR augmented with EDR solutions empowers analysts with data and abilities to act on the endpoint. These actions can range from gathering data to better prioritize threats, like getting running services, applications, users logged in or local files, to containment actions like quarantines and shutting down services.

By leveraging the principals of network security monitoring coupled with detection and prevention solutions, MDR solution providers offer posture hardening services and expand their threat coverage from network to EDR.

Better Together

While they are two different security solutions, they integrate to fill in security and resource gaps. Simply put, MDR can leverage EDR’s technologies to enhance its threat detection, analysis, and response capabilities.

There isn’t really a competition of which is better. Yes, they’re different, but most MDR providers use EDR functionality to achieve maximum visibility across the entire environment, so threats and breaches can be detected quickly and responded to appropriately.

Fortra’s Alert Logic knows the risk your company faces from all sides, every day. Our endpoint security monitors and isolates endpoint attacks at the earliest opportunity. With scalable pricing and an expert security operations team, you can count on us to make cybersecurity easy for you.

Fortra's Alert Logic Staff
About the Author
Fortra's Alert Logic Staff

Related Post

Ready to protect your company with Alert Logic MDR?