McAfee announced that it is partnering with ECS, a recognized leader in cybersecurity, cloud managed services, agile development digital transformation, advanced engineering and Amazon Web Services solutions, to offer managed threat detection and response (MDR) capabilities through McAfee MVISION EDR. ECS is the first North American MDR partner for McAfee MVISION EDR and will leverage MVISION EDR and supporting vendors to deliver a scalable, repeatable and customizable program that enables organizations to focus on only verified threats.

MDR solutions can help organizations by alleviating the customer challenges associated with alert fatigue, false positives, inexperienced staff and lack of defined processes. These are real-world challenges recently highlighted in a Forrester report with 36% of IT decision makers stating that the alerts surfaced by their EDR solution are false positives not worth investigating. Another 35% claim that their junior staff members lack the skill sets to triage and/or investigate alerts without support from senior staff.

"Protecting an organization against threats and attacks is a difficult endeavor that requires innovative technology coupled with technical know-how," said Anand Ramanathan, vice president of product and marketing, McAfee. "Unfortunately, despite having the right technology and experience, organizations face the challenges of dealing with alert fatigue and numerous false positives. Together with ECS we're working to help organizations overcome these challenges to better defend themselves."

"We have a rich history of working with McAfee to defend some of the most important endpoints in North America," said Andy Woods, vice president of enterprise managed services at ECS. "This MDR offering with McAfee MVISION EDR is another step in the direction of building on our relationship and providing our customers with the industry leading products and solutions that they need to enable their businesses and operations to run effectively."

McAfee and ECS have partnered for years to deliver managed endpoint security and monitoring for up to 1.4 million endpoints for the U.S. Army.

ECS leverages the powerful capabilities of McAfee MVISION EDR augmenting with security orchestration, automation, security analytics, threat intelligence platform and refined SOC practices. This creates more accurate and comprehensive alerts and provides information such as MITRE ATT&CK mapping and threat actor profiles to better understand how the organization was targeted, identify other potential areas of impact, and provide insight into how to protect from future attacks.

According to a Gartner report, Ask These Critical Questions and Consider These Risks When Selecting an MDR Provider, when looking for an MDR solution organizations should ask themselves questions like, "Do we need the provider to ensure service continuity, recovery and resiliency of its operations? If it has an issue and cannot provide 24/7 monitoring and response of threats as contracted, that creates a gap and risk for its customers." As well as, "What geographies do we need the provider to operate in and where can its security operations centers (SOCs) be located?" among other questions organizations should be asking.

Benefits of the ECS solution enabled by McAfee MVISION EDR include:

• 24x7x365 US based security monitoring and engineering
• Dedicated and named analysts, engineers and project managers
• Integrated security orchestration automation and response into customer environments
• Simplified and expediated remediation through actionable intelligence and forward looking recommendations of what to expect next
• A combination of industry leading threat intelligence platform, orchestration and security analytics helps provide additional correlation and enrichment of threat events, ensuring higher fidelity alerting, more context in investigations and better actionable intelligence
• An enhanced customer experience that delivers a comprehensive program by taking ownership and not assigning tasks back to the customer
• Regular delivery of metrics and reporting that matter to your team and executives enabling and clearly communicating program effectiveness and value