EDR sits on workstations and servers collecting deep telemetry — process ancestry, scripting abuse, lateral movement patterns. Alerts surface inside dashboards your internal IT stewards must interpret swiftly.
MDR vendors or partners staff security analysts reviewing those telemetry streams continuously, escalating only verified incidents needing client action.
Cost vs staffing reality
EDR licences cost money but dormant alerts still burn senior engineer midnight hours reacting to false positives. MDR folds human eyes into subscription — valuable when you lack 24-hour internal coverage.
Sophisticated internal teams blending EDR with SOAR orchestration occasionally self-manage cheaper than outsourced MDR; micro businesses rarely sustain that sustainably.
Choosing pragmatically
Start with regulated data inventory and incident history severity. If board risk appetite cannot tolerate six-hour blind windows overnight, MDR closes visibility gaps immediately after EDR sensor deployment.
We help Liverpool clients stage rollouts: baseline hardening, then EDR enablement, then optional MDR once alert noise patterns stabilise — avoiding double spend on overlapping vendor SKUs.