MANAGED DETECTION & RESPONSE
MDR Pricing & ROI
The Complete Guide for Business Strategy
Organizations across the small business and mid-market landscape face a fundamental strategic challenge: how to achieve 24/7 threat hunting coverage without ballooning the IT budget. When attackers target nights and weekends, the cost of the ensuing business interruption can quickly eclipse any perceived security savings.
Overview
This guide provides the pricing and framework needed to evaluate Managed Detection and Response (MDR) as a strategic investment. Before you invest another dollar in security tools, we'll help you analyze the trade-offs between building an internal team and partnering with a specialized MDR service provider.
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UNDERSTANDING MDR
What is managed detection and response?
Managed detection and response (MDR) is a cybersecurity service that combines human expertise and advanced tools to continuously monitor your environment for threats, neutralize confirmed attacks, and respond to incidents.
MDR services offer capabilities beyond basic endpoint security solutions, focusing on proactive threat hunting across your network. MDR also employs the services of threat hunters: security professionals with the expertise needed to identify threats that evade traditional security measures.
When organizations invest in MDR services, they get access to a team of highly skilled security experts who continuously monitor networks and collect and analyze logs to keep bad actors at bay. By combining automated rules with manual investigation techniques, MDR security enables organizations to reduce alert fatigue while accurately identifying real threats and prioritizing them over false positives.
FROM ANTIVIRUS TO MDR
The evolution of endpoint security
Cyber threats aren't what they used to be. Attackers are now faster, stealthier, and more sophisticated, demanding security solutions that evolve just as quickly. Understanding this evolution is key to choosing the right defense for your business.
Antivirus Software: The Legacy Defense
The earliest form of endpoint security scanned for known bad software based on signatures. While simple and fast in the 1990s and 2000s, this signature-based approach is now inadequate. Modern attackers use rapidly evolving tactics that bypass simple antivirus software.
Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR): The Reactive Tool
EDR evolved to monitor endpoints for anomalous behavior in real-time, providing a smarter, reactive tool for isolating infected devices and gathering forensic data. However, EDR focuses solely on endpoints, allowing threats that move across networks to slip by. Crucially, EDR tools generate a high volume of alerts that require dedicated, expert interpretation, which can be a significant burden for SMBs.
Extended Detection & Response (XDR): Breaking Down Silos
XDR takes security a step further by unifying detection and response across multiple security layers, including networks, cloud services, and email. This multi-layered approach helps catch sophisticated, coordinated attacks. However, the sheer complexity of configuring, managing, and interpreting XDR platforms around the clock remains the single biggest hurdle for resource-constrained SMBs.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR): Expertise on Demand
MDR is the solution built for the modern threat landscape. It removes the burden of constant monitoring by combining advanced XDR-like technology with 24/7 human expertise. MDR delivers proactive threat hunting, real-time monitoring, and expert response as a managed service, providing enterprise-grade protection without requiring a dedicated in-house security team.
With attackers working around the clock and using increasingly advanced tactics to bypass legacy security, MDR has become the preferred solution for modern businesses seeking cutting-edge threat protection. If you’re defending a small business with limited resources and in-house expertise, MDR may be the solution you need.
THE CORE PROBLEM
Why the DIY cybersecurity model creates cost & risk
The do-it-yourself approach to cybersecurity often leaves businesses exposed to a wide range of cyber exposures and vulnerabilities, which can lead to costly ransomware attacks.
What’s more, it’s not just large corporations with a target on their back: 82% of ransomware attacks are on small and midsize businesses (SMBs). In 2024, the average loss in a ransomware attack was $292,000 — and the financial impact extends beyond just ransom payments:
Average business interruption loss: $102,000
Average digital asset restoration cost: $18,000
Average forensic vendor cost: $58,000
SMBs make attractive targets for cyber attackers because they often lack the resources of their larger peers. With small or non-existent security teams and little budget dedicated to cybersecurity, SMBs look like an easy target for opportunistic cyber criminals.
This significant financial risk is often amplified by SMBs outsourcing security services to a third-party vendor whose primary focus isn't cyber risk and a lack of 24/7 coverage — failing to detect and respond to attacks that commence during off-hours, leading to more extended downtime.
STRATEGIC INVESTMENT
Evaluating MDR pricing and quantifiable return on investment
Before any security investment, business leaders team must calculate the total cost of ownership. Analysis from Coalition Security reveals that partnering with a proven security partner can result in up to 69% in annual cost savings, compared to trying to stitch together multiple security tools and staffing a 24/7 Security Operations Center (SOC).
Use the framework below when determining the potential return on investment for MDR services that works best for your business.
Features & Benefits | In-House Security | Security Partnership |
24/7 Threat Hunting | Requires a team of dedicated analysts to cover all shifts and holidays; high salary and HR overhead. | Around-the-clock support provided by a specialized team of experts; redirects significant staffing expenses. |
Attack Surface Monitoring | Requires buying, managing, and updating multiple vendor tools; high labor cost for daily monitoring. | Active monitoring eliminates vendor fees and manual labor, making the tool a benefit of the partnership. |
Incentive Alignment | The vendor is paid to sell a tool, resulting in complex deployment and little accountability for your long-term outcome. | Cyber insurance providers have a financial incentivize to stop threats before they strike. |
Expert Support & Incident Response | Retaining costly, external incident response counsel for pre-breach planning and crisis management. | Access to a premier incident response team for expert advice, whenever you need it. |
Evaluating security vendors?
Coalition Security products and services are purpose-built for small businesses to help you maximize savings while minimizing risk. See what you could save by partnering with Coalition Security compared to other security vendors using our Cost Savings Calculator.
INVESTED IN YOUR SUCCESS
The Coalition MDR Advantage
For true security partnership, both parties must have skin in the game. When your security partner is also your cyber insurance provider, incentives are aligned, and this shared financial motivation is a key differentiator that helps ensures your security controls are actively maintained and that you receive best-in-class defense.
Coalition Managed Detection & Response is designed specifically to accelerate your recovery efforts, and businesses that use MDR services see more than a 50% reduction in both mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-respond (MTTR).
This speed is driven by our unique combination of technology and expertise:
Expert remediation: Our teams do more than monitor; they fight cyber attacks every day and use that expertise to quickly contain and mitigate threats on your behalf.
<5 minute response time: Our affiliate, Coalition Incident Response (CIR), provides forensic specialists who respond to incidents in minutes, not days, helping accelerate your company's recovery efforts.
Industry-leading technology: We augment our experts with advanced tools, including leading EDR and XDR technologies and our unified cyber risk management platform, Coalition Control®.
Affordable & scalable: Our solutions are built for SMBs, without mandatory minimums or complex enterprise-level agreements that inflate costs.
Wondering if Coalition MDR is right for your business?
Talk to our experts about strengthening your security >
See how Coalition
MDR works for
businesses like yours
You don’t need a big budget to get big protection. Discover why all MDR is not created equal.
