Security technologies tend to be complex, expensive, and difficult to implement. They also require extensive specialist expertise to configure and maintain.  

Many IT security leaders learn this the hard way. After committing significant resources to building security capabilities in-house, the team struggles to keep pace as the organization grows. That’s often the moment a Managed Detection and Response (MDR) vendor steps in. 

MDR vendors provide scalable security talent and product expertise with dedicated 24/7 threat monitoring and response. But by the time your organization partners with an MDR provider, you may already have your own security tech stack. The success of that partnership depends on how well your MDR vendor integrates its services with your existing security tools. 

Not all vendors will let you bring your own tech 

Most MDR vendors focus on leveraging existing security tools instead of forcing clients to rip-and-replace their tech stack. However, many impose limits on what tools they are willing to work with. This means some of your organization’s security tools may not be included. 

Even if most of your existing tool set is supported, leaving part of your tech stack unmanaged introduces unnecessary risk. It becomes an obstacle to security performance, establishing a blind spot that your MDR’s Security Operation Center (SOC) has no visibility or control over. 

This approach makes it easy for the vendor to focus on the tools and technologies it knows best, but at a cost. If a threat actor compromises one of these unmanaged tools, your MDR vendor is unlikely to take responsibility for it. The burden of security will fall on your internal team, which defeats the point. 

MDR vendors should make security less complex, not more 

Many organizations struggle with fragmented security stacks and need solutions to integrate these tools seamlessly. Adding new technologies on top of your existing mix of legacy tools, cloud-native platforms, and on-premises infrastructure can add to complexity instead of reducing it. 

This is especially true with vendors who insist on using specific tools. Even if your existing tools provide the functionalities they need, you might implement new tools that overlap with them. This creates conflicts that make it hard to determine which tool to use in different detection and response scenarios. 

Instead of leveraging MDR expertise to consolidate cybersecurity technology and operations, you might end up doing the exact opposite. If important data remains siloed away from your core security processes, your MDR provider may overlook critical correlations that impact your security posture. It takes a true vendor-agnostic MDR provider to deliver on the promise of consolidation and streamline security operations effectively. 

Custom integrations are vital for security performance 

Every organization’s tech stack is unique. To ensure comprehensive threat detection and monitoring, every tool that generates meaningful security data must be integrated into your SOC. Every data source provides additional context that can mean the difference between a false positive and a successful early detection.  

Custom integrations ensure no data source remains out of reach. To be effective, your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platform must be able to connect with every log source in your environment. That includes security tools like firewalls as well as non-security sources like data warehousing platforms, IT operations tools, and communications solutions. 

That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have to integrate every single data source in your tech stack. One of the advantages of working with a reputable MDR vendor is utilizing specialist security expertise. Deciding what logs to keep and which ones to discard is a major part of the SIEM implementation process, and that decision should be made based on the security benefit of each log source—not how easy the integration might be. 

 Closely examining custom integration opportunities can make data throughput more efficient for the entire SOC. When combined with a data observability and routing solution like Cribl, you may effectively reduce data throughput costs for some of your most expensive security tools. This is just one example of how custom integrations can open the way to operational security excellence. 

Reduce complexity and cost with consolidation 

Your MDR vendor should provide you with a clear roadmap towards cybersecurity consolidation. Instead of managing multiple isolated security tools and navigating siloed data, your team should be conducting streamlined operations through a centralized security solution.   

Consolidation can dramatically reduce the time and complexity of threat detection, investigation, and response. Instead of forcing security analysts to switch between multiple tools they might not have deep familiarity with, they can use a single, fully-integrated solution that leverages every tool in your tech stack at once.  

This opens up new possibilities for Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR). Instead of manually creating incident response playbooks that address specific risks, you can create automated workflows that leverage much deeper context into threat actor behavior. Analysts can program automated workflows to launch when contextual data from multiple security tools confirms a threat—not when one or two alerts merely suggest one. 

Consolidation reduces the risk of vendor lock-in and ensures optimal visibility and control over security operations. This is especially important for organizations with complex hybrid IT environments, where separate security tools might address on-premises and cloud security risks. If threat actors conduct lateral movement across your organization, your SOC should be able to follow them and respond. 

Integrate your security tools with ShieldVision™ 

ShieldVision™ is a proprietary SOC automation service that provides full detection transparency across the security tech stack. Our consolidated security platform combines artificial intelligence with expert human insight to provide deep, contextual alert data to security professionals in near real-time. Leverage more than 320 publicly available integrations alongside custom integration capabilities from Lumifi’s team of product experts. 

Schedule a demo and discover how 24/7 monitoring and support through Lumifi’s vendor-agnostic platform can enhance security operations, increase visibility into your tech stack, and reduce risk.