Comcast Business today added the managed detection and response (MDR) services to its cybersecurity portfolio. The solution combines Comcast Business’s security services with Rapid7’s security operations (SecOps) platform and expertise, aiming to help medium and large enterprise customers rapidly identify and limit the impact of threats without the need for additional staff and resources.

MDR is a managed security service that typically uses a combination of human expertise and automation technologies to provide 24/7 monitoring and analysis of IT infrastructure for signs of malicious activity. It can also “rapidly detect, investigate and respond to unauthorized and/or suspicious activity; offer assurance that adversaries have not gained access via threat hunting; and recommend actions to improve overall security posture,” according to an earlier Forrester report.

“Today’s customers want a single provider to help manage security across their entire network, endpoint, server, cloud and identity infrastructure. They need a partner to help mitigate security breaches, not just notify them of a problem,” Shena Seneca Tharnish, VP of secure networking and cybersecurity solutions at Comcast Business, said in a statement.

Comcast Business’ new MDR services tap Rapid7’s Insight SecOps platform, which is designed to allow security, IT and DevOps to have easy access to vulnerability management, application security, incident detection and response, external threat intelligence, and orchestration and automation.

Combing Comcast Business’s security expertise with Rapid7’s SecOps platform, the new MDR services aims to offer the following services:

• Monitoring and response: The MDR service offers 24/7 monitoring and response to security incidents.
• Threat Detection: It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to identify and address known and emerging threats such as advanced persistent threats (APTs) and zero-day exploits.
• Expertise and resources: The service includes security operations center (SOC) support with security professionals with extensive knowledge and industry certifications.
• Compliance: It helps businesses report important documentation often requested for compliance audits.

“Our MDR solution accomplishes this and unifies threat detection, analytics and response into a seamless service – reducing the complexity and costs associated with cybersecurity management, while minimizing the impact of security incidents and providing analytics to help businesses with their compliance reporting obligations,” Tharnish said.

MDR competitive landscape

In the 2023 Forrester Wave report for MDR, the firm identified Expel, CrowdStrike and Red Canary as leaders; Secureworks, Rapid7, eSentire, Binary Defense, SentinelOne and Arctic Wolf as strong performers; BlueVoyant, ReliaQuest and Deepwatch as contenders; and IBM as a challenger.

Forrester recommended MDR customers look for providers that offer actual response capabilities without requiring automation, conduct threat hunting with defined criteria across various data sources, and provide data federation.

As the MDR market enters the next stage of maturity, vendors are facing the complex challenge of scaling their services for a broader customer base and a larger suite of services — “going from hundreds to thousands of customers and from a few services to many,” analysts noted in the Forrester Wave report.