Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is a cyber security service that combines advanced technology, threat intelligence, and human expertise to detect, investigate, and respond to cyber threats in real time. Unlike traditional security tools that only alert you to issues, MDR actively monitors your environment 24/7 and takes action to contain and mitigate threats — so your business stays protected around the clock.
Our MDR service is powered by a globally connected Security Operations Centre (SOC) that leverages AI-driven analytics, machine learning, and skilled analysts to deliver continuous protection across your endpoints, networks, and cloud infrastructure.
Lack of 24/7 Monitoring or Dedicated Security Resources
If your organisation lacks round-the-clock security staff or monitoring, MDR ensures continuous protection with expert oversight, safeguarding your business from cyber threats at all times.
Compliance with Australian Regulations
MDR helps your organisation meet key compliance requirements, such as the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) and the Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) Scheme, ensuring you stay compliant and avoid regulatory penalties.
Frequent or Advanced Cyber Threats
For organisations facing sophisticated threats like ransomware, phishing, or zero-day exploits, MDR provides advanced detection and rapid response, ensuring your business stays protected against evolving attacks.
Need for Faster Incident Response
MDR reduces the time between detecting and responding to cyber incidents, helping to mitigate damage quickly and minimise business disruption.
Rapid Organisational Growth
As your business expands, MDR scales with you, offering flexible and expert-driven security to protect your growing IT infrastructure and data without the need for large in-house teams.
Adaptive MDR is a 24x7 service for detection, triage, investigation and pre-authorised containment across endpoints, network, identity, cloud, SaaS and email. The AI-SOC handles L1 triage and L2 investigation, while senior human analysts validate critical conclusions and hold response authority.
Our MDR service is powered by a globally connected Security Operations Centre (SOC) that leverages AI-driven analytics, machine learning, and skilled analysts to deliver continuous protection across your endpoints, networks, and cloud infrastructure.
Adaptive MDR is a continuous operating model. Telemetry is assessed, detections are triaged and investigated, and approved containment can be applied only within the customer-approved containment matrix. Here is how the service works.
1. Collect
Everything starts with visibility. An MDR service ingests telemetry from across your environment - endpoint activity, network traffic, identity and authentication events, cloud platform logs and email security data - and brings it into one place where it can be correlated. An alert on a single endpoint means very little in isolation. The same alert, alongside an unusual login from a new country and a spike in outbound traffic, is a different story entirely. Where you already run security information and event management, MDR builds on that foundation rather than replacing it.
2. Detect and triage
The AI-SOC handles L1 triage and L2 investigation, using detection logic and context to identify alerts that require further attention. Senior human analysts validate critical conclusions and retain response authority.
3. Investigate
Senior human analysts review critical findings, validate conclusions and determine the appropriate response within the agreed service scope. They investigate affected accounts, hosts and relevant telemetry to establish context before any containment decision.
4. Respond and contain
Containment is governed by the customer-approved containment matrix agreed during onboarding. Adaptive MDR never acts beyond that matrix. Destructive, safety-impacting or business-critical actions require explicit approval.
5. Report and harden
Adaptive MDR provides onboarding, monthly service, quarterly review and P1/P2 post-incident reports. The service can recommend detection tuning based on observed activity.
Adaptive MDR is defined by its agreed operating model, service scope and customer-approved response authority. Infotrust's Adaptive MDR service includes:
ATLAS onboarding covers Assets, Threats, Log Sources, Actions and Scenarios. It establishes the service baseline, customer-approved containment matrix and 30/60/90-day roadmap.
Adaptive MDR provides 24x7 detection, triage and investigation for organisations that do not operate those functions continuously.
Adaptive MDR establishes an agreed operating model, reporting cadence and containment matrix during onboarding.
Adaptive MDR brings together relevant endpoint, network, identity, cloud, SaaS and email telemetry for detection, triage and investigation.
Priority-based SLAs begin when an alert reaches the SOC and are inclusive. Containment is limited to the agreed matrix, with explicit approval required for destructive, safety-impacting or business-critical actions.
The acronyms overlap badly, and vendors are not always careful about the distinction. One question cuts through it: when something is found, who acts on it? Tools detect. MDR decides and acts.
Endpoint detection and response is a technology that watches endpoint behaviour and flags suspicious activity. It’s often part of how MDR is delivered. The distinction is operational: EDR is a tool you own and must staff, MDR is a service where somebody else does the staffing.
XDR widens the same idea past the endpoint to network, identity, email and cloud signals, correlating them into a single view. It is a better tool than EDR alone. It’s still a tool - it produces higher-quality detections that someone still has to investigate and act on.
A SIEM aggregates and correlates log data and raises alerts against rules you define. It’s a detection and evidence platform, not a response capability, and an unstaffed SIEM mostly generates alerts nobody reads. MDR is frequently the layer that makes a SIEM investment worth having.
A traditional managed security service provider looks after your security infrastructure - firewalls, gateways, patching - and passes alerts to you. MDR is defined by outcome rather than by device management: the provider investigates and contains rather than forwarding the problem.
These are close relatives and the terms are often used interchangeably. SOC-as-a-Service generally describes the full outsourced security operations function, of which MDR is the detection and response core. Read the scope, not the label.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provides organisations with proactive, 24/7 cybersecurity, combining advanced technology, threat intelligence, and expert analysts to detect, respond to, and mitigate cyber threats in real time. Here are the key business benefits:
MDR ensures constant monitoring and swift threat response, protecting your business even without an internal security team. It helps prevent downtime and data loss by addressing issues as they arise.
With AI-driven analytics and human expertise, MDR detects threats faster and reduces the time between detection and remediation, minimising potential damage.
MDR uses advanced threat intelligence to identify complex attacks, such as ransomware and phishing, that traditional tools may miss, providing proactive protection against emerging threats.
As your organisation grows, MDR scales with you, ensuring your cyber security remains robust and adaptable without the need for significant investment in additional resources.
MDR helps meet compliance requirements like the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) and the Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) Scheme, reducing regulatory and reputational risk.
MDR offers enterprise-level protection at a fraction of the cost of building and maintaining an in-house security team, helping you avoid large upfront expenses.
MDR reduces the impact of cyber threats on your operations, ensuring minimal disruption and maintaining customer trust and confidence.
Cyber security incidents can lead to downtime, financial loss, and reputational damage. With MDR, your organisation is better equipped to prevent, detect, and respond to threats, minimising the potential for operational disruptions. This resilience not only protects your bottom line but also ensures customer trust and confidence in your organisation.
Global vendors sell the same MDR playbook everywhere. The obligations, the threat picture and the reporting deadlines are local.
Australian organisations covered by the Privacy Act have to meet the Australian Privacy Principles and, where an eligible data breach occurs, the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme - which runs to a defined assessment and notification timeframe. You can’t notify accurately if you can’t establish what was accessed and when. Depending on your sector, the Essential Eight, the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act or APRA CPS 234 may also apply, each with its own expectations around monitoring, detection and incident reporting. MDR produces the detection record and incident documentation those frameworks assume you have. See ensuring regulatory compliance for how this fits a broader programme.
Australian organisations are also targeted on Australian time. Attackers know when your team is asleep, and long weekends and the Christmas shutdown period are well-established windows for ransomware deployment. Sector matters too: healthcare, professional services, education, government suppliers and critical infrastructure operators all carry data or access that makes them worth the effort, and supply-chain compromise means being small is no longer the same as being uninteresting.
Three practical reasons.
MDR is a crowded market and the brochures read identically. These are the questions that actually separate providers:
Infotrust delivers MDR from a globally connected SOC, with a direct escalation path into incident response, threat intelligence and CISO advisory services.
Solving complex cyber security challenges comes with some serious business benefits.
To win the cyber security battle and protect your business, you need to connect next-generation technologies with business policies to create a robust security ecosystem. It's no mean feat, but with the right support, your business can thrive.
MDR is a managed cyber security service that detects, investigates and responds to threats in your environment 24 hours a day. It combines detection technology, threat intelligence and human security analysts working from a security operations centre. The difference between MDR and a security product is that MDR includes people who act on what the technology finds, rather than leaving that work to your team.
MDR runs as a continuous cycle. Telemetry from your endpoints, network, identities and cloud services is collected and correlated, analytics and threat intelligence filter genuine threats out of routine noise, and a SOC analyst investigates anything confirmed. The analyst then contains the threat - isolating a host or disabling an account, for example - and reports back. Detections are tuned afterwards so the same technique is caught sooner.
At minimum: round-the-clock monitoring, detection and triage, analyst-led investigation, active containment, threat hunting and regular reporting. A complete service also covers onboarding and tuning to your environment, threat intelligence relevant to your sector, and a defined escalation route into full incident response. Scope varies significantly between providers, so check what the SOC is contractually permitted to do without calling you first.
EDR is software that monitors endpoint behaviour and flags suspicious activity. MDR is a service, and EDR is often one of the tools it uses. Buying EDR gives you detections that your team must interpret and action. Buying MDR gives you somebody else's analysts doing that work, across the endpoint and everything around it.
XDR is a technology platform that correlates security signals across endpoints, network, identity, email and cloud into a single view. MDR is the managed service that operates a platform like that on your behalf. XDR improves the quality of detections; it does not investigate them. Some providers describe a fully managed XDR deployment as MXDR, which in practice is MDR built on an XDR platform.
A SOC is the team and facility that performs security monitoring. MDR is a service delivered by one. SOC-as-a-Service usually describes the entire outsourced security operations function, with MDR as its detection and response core. The terms overlap heavily in the market, so compare the scope of work rather than the label on the proposal.
A traditional MSSP manages your security infrastructure - firewalls, gateways, patching - and forwards alerts for your team to handle. MDR is measured on outcomes instead of device uptime: the provider investigates alerts and contains threats directly. Many MSSPs now offer MDR alongside infrastructure management, so ask specifically whether the service includes response.
A SIEM is a platform that aggregates log data, correlates it and raises alerts against defined rules. It is a detection and evidence tool, not a response capability, and it needs skilled people to build rules and act on output. MDR supplies those people. Many organisations run both, with the MDR provider operating or co-managing the SIEM.
MDR is an ongoing service that watches for threats and contains them early, usually before they escalate. Incident response is what happens when something has already gone badly wrong, and covers forensic investigation, containment at scale, recovery and regulatory support. They are complementary - MDR should reduce how often you need incident response, and escalate cleanly into it when you do.
Continuous coverage without hiring a 24/7 team, faster containment and shorter attacker dwell time, access to specialist detection engineering and threat hunting you could not justify in-house, security that scales as the business grows, and documented detection and response evidence for compliance obligations. For most mid-sized organisations the economics are the deciding factor.
Because detection without response is not protection. Most organisations already own security tools that generate alerts nobody has time to investigate, and attackers deliberately operate outside business hours to exploit exactly that. MDR makes sure a qualified person sees the alert that matters and acts on it immediately, which is what limits the damage.
MDR suits any organisation that holds data or systems worth attacking but cannot staff security monitoring around the clock - which describes most Australian mid-market businesses. It is a strong fit if you have compliance obligations to evidence, have grown faster than your security team, or already own good tooling that nobody has the capacity to monitor properly.
Traditional managed security services are built around managing devices and keeping infrastructure healthy, with alerting passed back to the client. MDR is built around detecting and stopping attacks. The practical test is what the provider does when a real threat appears: a traditional service tells you about it, an MDR service contains it and then tells you.
Ask which containment actions the SOC will take without your approval, where the analysts and your data are located, what the response SLA commits to and how it is measured, and whether the provider can escalate into genuine incident response and forensics. Then check how the service is tuned to your environment during onboarding. Local presence matters for both data sovereignty and Australian breach-notification timeframes.
