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Key Considerations When Purchasing Cybersecurity: Building a Business Case

by Daniel West on November 21, 2018

In the previous post, we provided a framework to assist you in understanding your security options (based on company size and maturity); and included a list of questions quantifying time and money.

This post will focus on comparing Managed Detection and Response (MDR) with building similar capabilities in-house or outsourcing to an MSSP, and why many companies opt to go with MDR services. When working with customers, its very easy to help them build a business case around why MDR offers the best value for their company. In the current state of the market, many companies need to “do more with less” and this is where the value of MDR comes into play. There are many ways such a business case can be built. In this post, I’ll compare the two most common examples we see: in-house and MSSP.

To put MDR in perspective, think of a SOC-in-a-box: vulnerability management, threat hunting, threat intelligence, log management, incident response, compliance reporting, EDR, 24/7 analysts, compliance auditing, etc. The key point to MDR is doing all the above components, while using best-of-breed technology that is easy to manage and integrate into your environment.

Now, to build the case, imagine each of these features operating within a business environment in the three use-cases; the approximate annual costs are detailed in the chart below (determined based on previous projects). The example is based on a company with 500 endpoints, is presented in US dollars:

Resource	In-house Costs	Outsource to MSSP	IntelliGO MDR
SIEM (Log Management Functionality)	$50,000 (tool)	$50,000 (tool) + $72,000	Included
Vulnerability Management	$3,200	$3,200 + $30,000	Included
Threat Intelligence Feeds	Feed 1 – $24,000/year	Feed 1 – $24,000 (integrations not included) + $18,000	Included (65+ feeds)
Endpoint Detection & Response (500 licenses)	$17,500 ($35/endpoint/year)	$30,000/year (licenses + management)	(Read more...)