ESET has expanded its offerings for managed service providers, making its managed detection and response (MDR) offering available through that channel for the first time.

The company announced the addition to its MSP line card at its recent ESET World conference in Las Vegas. With the expansion, the whole of its business-to-business lineup is available for MSPs. This comes as more solution providers who have been offering infrastructure-focused managed services are adding more managed security services to their offerings.

“It allows our existing MSPs to quickly start to transition into an MSSP,” said Bob Bonneau, country manager for ESET Canada. “It lets them do that without costly investments in in-house infrastructure, in training and even in skill development to deliver it. They can partner with us and transition to offering 24-by-seven support by doing that.”

MDR was a hot topic at ESET World, with the announcement and several mentions from the main stage. In a presentation, Craig Robinson, research vice president for security and trust at IDC, noted that among companies looking to handle detection and response, currently, only 27 percent do it all in-house. Thirteen percent completely outsource to an MSSP or MDR provider, but the dominant model is for customers to mix internal and external resources, with 60 percent reporting that approach. SMB customers, he said, are more likely than enterprises to outsource most or all of their MDR deployment to a service provider. 

“MDR is such a no-brainer when it comes to saving money,” Robinson told attendees. “Just try to put this stuff together on your own. What’s that budget going to be like, especially in the SMB market?”

Robinson said that, on average, it takes 13 highly-trained people to manage a company’s SOC.

He also noticed the increasing importance of having a detection and response strategy in qualifying for cyber insurance and keeping premiums as reasonable as possible. MDR can be very helpful, Robinson said, in a market where cyber insurance is “hard to get and hard to keep.”

Bonneau said ESET Canada enjoyed double-digit growth with MSPs in 2024 and expects that growth to continue this year. The MDR marketplace is currently valued at about $4 billion (US) per year and growing at a lusty 23 percent CAGR over the next four years. He figures that kind of growth is accurate or possibly even conservative for Canada, which is likely to be heavy on outsourced MDR as a nation dominated by SMBs.

“There’s a massive skills shortage, and SMBs can’t afford to retain or keep talent from getting gobbled up, so there’s a kind of outcry for a service like MDR in the Canadian market,” Bonneau said.

Robinson said MDR buyers should look for two things: a solution that gets the job done and provides value. However, he added that customers should pay close attention to their MDR vendor’s approach to AI. Almost all MDR buyers (95 percent in an IDC study) said their MDR providers were doing a good job incorporating generative AI into their solutions.

“If you’re among the other five percent, dump your provider,” Robinson said.

Among MDR users, about half “just trust the system” to handle business automatically, while the remaining half split about evenly into camps, with their people keeping an eye on the MDR solution and those who trust an MSP or MSSP to do so.