FireEye’s Mandiant Managed Defense Recognized as a Strong Performer for MDR

A common challenge I hear when talking to customers is the difficulty in finding unbiased, third-party recommendations for security services and technology. Fortunately, buyers looking for the most effective Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provider for their organization now have official guidance from one of the foremost voices in the industry.

Forrester recently published The Forrester Wave™: Managed Detection and Response, Q1 2021. In this seminal report, Forrester ranked FireEye’s MDR service, Mandiant Managed Defense as a “Strong Performer.”

As an executive and longtime security practitioner, I welcomed this objective analysis and have some thoughts around Forrester’s rating of our current Managed Defense offering, and what I see as acknowledgement of our technology-agnostic strategy.

We think our high ranking for “strength of current offering” is a testament to Mandiant’s ability to protect our customers with the most cutting-edge frontline detections in the industry. Our speed in integrating front-line intelligence and our attacker research into Managed Defense to protect our customers at scale is important. It's different, and it’s a significant part of what distinguishes us.

Integral to Managed Defense is Mandiant Threat Intelligence, which Forrester recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: External Threat Intelligence Services (ETIS), Q1 2021.

I believe Forrester’s rating for Managed Defense highlights that we offer a complete MDR solution that protects endpoints, networks, email communications, cloud and ICS/OT assets. Managed Defense provides customers peace of mind that they’re protected from impactful cyber attacks regardless of the attack vector. We received the highest ratings for our threat intelligence, threat hunting, managed detection, and managed response (among others)—all born from our legacy of finding evil and solving crime at Mandiant.

MITRE has also acknowledged the strength of Managed Defense threat hunting, detection, investigation, and response. FireEye obtained the highest cumulative score in the  MITRE ATT&CK ® EDR evaluation, showcasing our advanced threat hunting and detection capabilities with FireEye Endpoint Security.

The Forrester report observes that innovation is rapid in the MDR space and within Managed Defense and notes, “FireEye steps out of its own product ecosystem in its MDR service.”

Our continuous innovation also resulted in a re-vamped hunting program designed in concert with our customers to meet their needs, as well as with our threat researchers and incident responders, to ensure the highest-fidelity results. Managed Defense threat hunting consists of hunts powered by up-to-the-minute threat intelligence from our IR practice and threat research across our vast telemetry. Customers get complete transparency into what we’re hunting for, why (to include links to our intelligence articles written about the threat actor or technique), and results that are directly mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK ® framework.

Lastly, we believe the Forrester report affirms our strong hunting capabilities when stating, “FireEye’s MDR offering is one aimed at more sophisticated practitioners, with an MDR with mature investigative methodologies and strong threat hunting capabilities as one would expect given [FireEye’s] reputation for incident response.”

Understanding Our Customers is Paramount

The Managed Defense team understands that our customers are seasoned and educated with clear ideas about what they want from an MDR service and how it fits into their security strategy. We know they expect continuous innovation, to benefit from the scope and scale of their MDR provider, and comprehensive response to incidents; all in addition to the basics of fast and accurate threat detection. They expect us to augment their security team, improving their understanding of adversaries, providing proactive security guidance, and to assist them in making fast, informed response decisions.

Our mission is, and has always been, to relentlessly protect customers from impactful cyber attacks. Constant innovation is necessary to meet the challenges our customers and community face every day from the ever-evolving threat landscape. Managed Defense will continue to innovate and evolve to execute on our strategic vision to protect the world’s cyber assets. The best is yet to come from Managed Defense as integrate new machine learning and XDR capabilities to identify and investigate incidents at machine speed. With this, Managed Defense plans to extend our support for third-party technologies. We have more than a few exciting things we are working on this year, so expect me to be back here telling you about them in the coming months.