Boost Your Managed IT Security Services with MDR: Here’s How?

Businesses (SMBs and enterprises) nowadays are dealing with cyber threats of different levels. From AI-powered phishing and ransomware attacks to deepfakes and supply chain breaches, the threat landscape in 2025 demands a more agile and robust approach.

For business owners, it means thinking about something more advanced alongside your existing managed IT security services. While traditional managed IT security services are good, they have certain limitations. Rapid threat detection, proactive threat hunting, and swift incident response aren’t the strongest features of traditional Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs).

That’s why you need MDR solutions to boost your existing Managed Security Service (MSS). Go through this comprehensive guide to learn how MDR supercharges your MSS.

Managed IT Security Services: the Broader Picture of Cybersecurity

Managed IT security services involve a third-party team of experts, handling the foundational security functions of a business. They are responsible for constant monitoring of the company systems, assessing threats, and applying critical patch management to fix software vulnerabilities.

This outsourcing provides efficient security management and real-time threat intelligence. Organizations can maintain a strong cybersecurity front without relying on an expensive team of in-house experts when relying on managed IT security services.

In short, managed IT security service providers help organizations with IT infrastructure support and maintenance, and a significant level of threat response. The following are the different spectrums of services a Managed Security Service Providers helps you with:

1. Security Monitoring

Managed IT Security Services include monitoring the IT infrastructure of an organization, including the devices, networks, and applications, and detecting suspicious activities and unauthorized access.

This proactive monitoring requires utilizing Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools to analyze data and detect critical threat incidents in real-time.

2. Patch Management

This service ensures that all software and the organization’s operating systems are up-to-date with the latest security updates from vendors.

Patch management is the process of managing the vulnerabilities of your system and fixing them before attackers can exploit them. It’s a prevention tactic for the IT infrastructure so that the IT team doesn’t have to worry about defending against sophisticated threats later.

3. Firewall Management

MSSPs who provide managed IT security solutions manage the company’s firewalls by configuring and maintaining them to act as a barrier between the internal network and threats from external sources.

The process requires MSSPs to establish rules that permit authorized traffic and block malicious activities, and to monitor network traffic for policy violations.

4. Endpoint Security Management

Managed IT security services also provide protection of your organization’s endpoints with anti-malware, endpoint detection and response, and mobile device management (MDM).

The continuous monitoring of the IT infrastructure, cloud, patch management, and antivirus installation through third-party MSSPs ensures endpoint security.

5. Incident Response & Remediation

While managed IT security solutions help form an immediate response to security incidents for cyber attack breaches, the level of their involvement varies. While many managed IT security providers offer monitoring and threat alerts, fewer go the extra mile in delivering advanced solutions like Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services, thereby taking care of the entire incident lifecycle.

Where are Traditional Managed IT Security Services Falling Short?

Managed IT security services consider and engage the broader picture of your cybersecurity.  From safeguarding your IT infrastructure, patch management, to ensuring network security, firewall management, cloud security, and identity theft management, Managed IT security services always have their hands full.

However, even the strict and routine monitoring and maintenance by managed security service providers (MSSPs) may fall short. The rapidly evolving threat landscape of today requires something more advanced and robust to quickly neutralize threats. Here’s why:

Limited Visibility and Customization

MSSPs sometimes operate at arm’s length, using standardized tools across clients. This usually leads to reduced visibility into specialized systems. There’s always a lack of fine-grained customization for organizations with unique security needs and different attack surfaces.

Slow or Generic Incident Response

While traditional managed IT security services are quick to monitor threats, sending alerts, and preparing an incident response is far from quick. Typically, they leave the responsibility of actual investigation and remediation to the clients, who can lack both expertise and resources to form a proper threat response.

Alert Overload and Fatigue

Traditional managed security services generate a high volume of threat alerts. However, a significant number of those alerts are false positives. The client can get irritated at such steps, and their reluctance to respond can create an opening for real threats.

Advanced tuning and contextual understanding are necessary to detect and respond to real threats that need incident response.

Lack of Deep Threat Hunting

MSS relies mostly on signature-based, rules-driven detection. Simply, it waits for the threat to arrive and alerts users about preparing an incident response. There’s a lack of proactive threat hunting for novel, sophisticated, or persistent threats.

Complex Integration and Vendor Fragmentation

MSS deployments struggle when it comes to integrating multiple security tools. This inability leads to data silos. Inefficient threat correlation and cumbersome incident handling result from leaving different points of the client’s security front left in fragments.

Scalability and Resource Challenges

Scalability is a significant issue with most providers of managed IT security services. It’s not easy to maintain high standards without investing in high-end technology and increasing specialized staff.

Evolving Attack Techniques

Modern cybersecurity threats have advanced. Bad actors are using advanced evasion, AI-powered phishing tools, and zero-day exploits. They are using multi-stage tactics to easily bypass legacy, static defense used in various traditional managed IT security services.

How Sangfor Athena MDR Enhances Managed IT Security Services

Sangfor Athena MDR enhances your organization’s cybersecurity with proactive threat detection and swift personalized response powered by AI significantly enhancing your organization’s cybersecurity.

Proactive Threat Detection & Hunting

MDR solutions take an advanced measure to hunt down threats using the XDR platform and human-AI expertise.  It fills the gaps left by traditional managed IT security services by responding to both known and unknown threats.

Faster Incident Response

MDR solutions take an offensive and proactive measure to hunt down and manage threats before they put the organization’s security at risk. It minimizes the dwell time left by other traditional managed IT security services that only restrict their services to just alerting IT after an attack has occurred.

Access to Security Expertise

When managed IT security services also include MDR cybersecurity, they are adding experienced cybersecurity professionals who analyze advanced threats, recommend tailored responses, and keep updating the defense strategies.

MDR services take care of a significant level of human interaction with analysts overseeing and responding to different threats.

Cost-Effective and Scalable Solutions

Even as a component of larger managed IT security services, MDR solutions can be more expensive in some cases. Interestingly, these advanced IT security solutions are still cost effective. How?

Well, organizations simply relying on a managed IT security solution would need to build an in-house Security Operations Center (SOC). This leads to additional operating costs. On the contrary, MDR solutions rid organizations of that extra operational cost by outsourcing SOCs from around the world.

Regulatory Compliance Support

Sangfor Athena MDR includes compliance reporting tools and routines to help meet standards like HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, APAC and industry-specific requirements.

MDR Completes Your Managed IT Security Services

Both Sangfor Athena MDR services and its traditional Managed IT Security Services are critical to your cybersecurity needs, given the complex nature of cyber threats today. However, MDR as an advanced solution supercharges your traditional managed IT security solutions with proactive and context-aware threat detection.

Additionally, Sangfor Athena MDR solutions provide quick incident responses, which most MSSPs don’t offer as part of their services. Sangfor Athena MDR provides round-the-clock monitoring, detection, and threat response, establishing a foundation for strong cybersecurity, alongside managed IT security services.

So, would you boost your cybersecurity with Sangfor Athena MDR solutions or continue to put up with increased downtimes? Contact Sangfor for a demo of Athena MDR.