Introduction: Why Detection Alone Isn’t Enough 

Modern attack surfaces need increased telemetry. Increased telemetry results in more detection opportunities. More detection opportunities result in more alerts. As such, organisations look to bolster their team and tooling but still find themselves detecting well but responding poorly.

Well maintained tools often improve detection coverage and decrease noise. However, expanding their response capability is trickier. The detections that teams build on their 9-5 shift run 24/7/365 and detect things on that basis. When they do, who picks it up? Almost certainly not the 9-5 detections team! So, teams need to have 24/7 capability which is resilient enough to accommodate sickness, holidays, etc. In the blink of an eye, the tooling and team needs of a typical organisation have changed.

There are of course solutions. This article focusses on three; Managed Detection and Response (MDR) which is mostly endpoint focussed outsourcing, eXtended Detection and Response (XDR) which delivers more telemetry and native response capability, and Managed XDR (MXDR) which outsources XDR.

What Traditional MDR Delivers – and Where It Falls Short

MDR is an outsourced service model which focusses on alerting on and responding to detections. In most cases, MDR is closely tied to a specific tool, usually an EDR platform. The MDR provider uses the tool on behalf of the customer, to remove the burden of designing, building, maintaining, and operating a 24/7 SOC team.

MDR services often accelerate detection maturity and provide access to experienced analysts, who are hard to attract and keep. For teams with limited internal capability, this can represent a meaningful improvement over unmanaged tooling.

While this model provides a boon, telemetry is often narrow. Constrained by the underlying platform, visibility beyond endpoints remains the concern of the customer. Since there are context cues from IdPs, cloud services, email gateways, etc. which are limited or missing entirely,  the MDR service may address the endpoint but leave your internal team blind to initial access and how the incident unfolded across your estate.

Response capability can also be constrained. Many MDR services notify only or perform basic containment and leave the responsibility for wider investigation, remediation, and recovery with the customer. As a result, organisations may detect threats faster but still struggle to resolve them fully and consistently.

XDR Explained: Broader Visibility, New Complexity

XDR is best understood as a technology-led approach designed to integrate telemetry from multiple security domains into a single detection and response platform. Rather than focusing on a single control layer, XDR brings together data from disparate sources to provide broader visibility across the environment.

This integrated view offers clear benefits. Correlating activity across multiple sources improves signal quality and reduces reliance on isolated alerts. XDR gives analysts better visibility of attacks, making it easier to identify initial access methods through to attack completion rather than simply responding to disconnected events. In mature environments, this can significantly improve investigative efficiency.

However, XDR requires skilled people and effective operating models to succeed. The platform may provide richer data, but their value is only realised if organisations have the bandwidth and expertise to use it. Many organisations struggle to operationalise XDR for precisely these reasons.

In these cases, XDR improves visibility without necessarily improving outcomes, reinforcing the gap between detection capability and effective response.

How MXDR Is Different: Technology + Ownership + Outcome

MXDR is an operating model that outsources the management and use of the toolset described in the previous section. Unlike standalone XDR or MDR, MXDR is designed to integrate technology and people into a repeatable operating model which is focused on resolving incidents using the capabilities of disparate tools together.

At a technical level, MXDR is essentially the same as XDR. However, the differentiator in MXDR is how this data is operationalised. In much the same way that MDR provides organisations with a reliable and quick way to boost detection and response maturity, MXDR takes this a step further.

MXDR places 24/7 human-led investigation at the centre of the model. Experienced analysts are responsible for incidents end to end and are enabled to own incidents from initial detection through to closure. Incidents do not need to pass between teams. Decisions are made by people with the context, authority, and experience to act decisively.

MXDR also helps organisations mature their security automation since there’s a high chance that organisations have had the same, or at least very similar, use cases. For example, MXDR providers often have automated containment actions available as standard to reduce noise, enrich detections, accelerate response actions, etc. By removing repetitive tasks on day one, analysts can focus on investigation quality and decision-making rather than alert handling. For an organisation to build this capability from the ground up is difficult and MXDR helps short circuit that.

Operationally, this represents a clear shift. MXDR moves organisations from teams handling alerts to receiving outcomes, and from visibility to action. 

Since MXDR providers tend to be multi-tenant operations, organisations they protect benefit from visibility gained from other customers to inform proactive security measures, like threat hunting and detection engineering. Using patterns observed across environments informs faster and more accurate response actions.

Why the Difference Matters Operationally

The difference between MDR, XDR, and MXDR becomes obvious during active incidents. MXDR benefits from earlier attack visibility and deeper investigation capability which allows organisations to intervene sooner. For example, a phishing attack which drops malware may be stopped at the mail gateway and the sender blocked from the domain before it ever hits an inbox using XDR or MXDR. Then this intelligence is turned into threat hunts for the rest of the customers covered by the MXDR provider. XDR can achieve this but the team who investigates is internal, and MDR is unlikely to see the email until the malware it drops is seen on the device.

With MXDR, decisions are made based on a complete view of the incident and pre-agreement from customers rather than being delayed by escalation paths or fragmented responsibility. This decreases response times and frees internal resource to focus on actions which the MXDR provider cannot.

This operational clarity matters most in environments where resilience is critical such as energy. Regulated industries must demonstrate control, accountability, and consistent response under pressure. 

MXDR can also be a good option for lean internal teams, regardless of sector, by bringing XDR capability and staff where cost would prohibit otherwise.

In these contexts, the operating model matters as much as the technology.

Conclusion: Choosing the Right Model for Modern Threats

Too often the challenge with XDR is operational. While XDR provides broad visibility and powerful detection, running it effectively requires mature processes, skilled people, and sustained operational effort, all of which require time, effort, and cost. MXDR makes these capabilities accessible by pairing XDR-level telemetry with an operating model which removes the overhead of building and maintaining security operations internally.

There is no single right answer for every organisation. The choice between MDR, XDR, and MXDR depends on budget, internal capability, and operational requirements. What matters most is understanding how each model functions in practice and selecting the approach that delivers outcomes rather than alerts.