A threat actor spent a Sunday afternoon quietly attempting to exfiltrate credentials and data from a client environment. No one on the MSP’s internal team noticed, because it was the weekend. Todyl’s MXDR detection engineers caught it, launched an investigation, and contacted the MSP directly. Justin Mirsky, Managing Partner at DBT, recalls: “When I got the call from their detection engineers on a Sunday, I asked them to jump in and help us and they agreed right away.”
That gap between when an attack happens and when anyone is available to answer it is the problem MXDR was built to solve. The global average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million in 2024, a 10 percent increase from the prior year, while the global cybersecurity workforce faces a gap of more than 4.8 million unfilled positions. Most organizations do not have the people to defend themselves around the clock even when they own the tools to try.
Before you can evaluate MXDR, you need to understand what separates it from MDR and XDR, two terms that get used interchangeably despite describing very different things. Getting the distinction wrong costs real money: you either overpay for complexity your team cannot operationalize, or you run under-protected on a platform no one is actively watching.
This guide breaks down every term, every comparison, and every business decision connected to MDR, XDR, and MXDR.
MXDR, or Managed eXtended Detection and Response, is a fully managed security service that combines the broad, multi-source telemetry of XDR technology with 24/7 human analyst coverage. It detects and responds to threats across endpoints, networks, identities, cloud environments, and email, without requiring you to staff or build your own Security Operations Center.
To understand MXDR, we start by unpacking what Managed eXtended Detection and Response means. The term combines two concepts that are worth pulling apart before you put them back together.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) is the technology layer. XDR collects and correlates security telemetry from multiple sources simultaneously: endpoints, network traffic, cloud workloads, identity systems, and email. Instead of a tool that only sees what is happening on a single device, XDR builds a unified picture of threat activity across your entire environment. It uses behavioral analytics and pre-trained detection models to catch patterns that a rule-based system would miss, and it can execute automated response actions, like isolating a compromised endpoint or revoking a suspicious user session, in seconds.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is the service layer. When you buy MDR, you are buying a team of security analysts who watch your environment around the clock, triage alerts, confirm or rule out threats, and either respond directly or hand off to your team with clear, actionable findings. MDR describes a coverage model rather than a specific technology. The technology underneath MDR can be XDR, a traditional SIEM, or a combination of both.
MXDR is what happens when you combine them. It is XDR technology delivered as a managed service, operated by a dedicated team of detection engineers and security analysts. MXDR gives you the breadth of XDR coverage, threat visibility across every layer of your environment, plus the human expertise of MDR, without the capital expense, staffing burden, or operational complexity of building any of it in-house.
For MSPs, MXDR becomes a capability you can deliver to every client at scale, backed by a SOC you never had to build. For SMBs and end users, it means enterprise-grade protection that does not require enterprise-grade headcount. For VARs and partners, it is a differentiated offering that adds recurring revenue without adding operational weight to your team.
Each generation of detection technology addressed limitations in the one before it. Understanding that progression makes the MDR vs. XDR vs. MXDR comparison much clearer.
EDR, or Endpoint Detection and Response, gave security teams real visibility into what was happening on individual devices: laptops, servers, workstations. An EDR tool deploys an agent on each endpoint, captures behavioral telemetry, and enables analysts to investigate suspicious activity or trigger containment actions at the device level.
Its limitation is scope. EDR sees the endpoint. If an attacker compromises a cloud identity and moves laterally through your network before touching any device, that activity happens entirely outside EDR’s line of sight. EDR remains foundational, but it is a starting point rather than a complete coverage model.
Network Detection and Response watches what moves across the network rather than what happens on a device. It catches lateral movement, data exfiltration attempts, and command-and-control communication that endpoint tools frequently miss. Organizations running complex or segmented environments often layer NDR on top of EDR to close that visibility gap.
Both EDR and NDR are detection technologies that still require someone to operate them. The two models that follow, MDR and XDR, solve different halves of that problem.
MDR, Managed Detection and Response, is a security service that wraps analyst coverage around your existing or provider-managed detection tooling. When a threat fires at 2am on a Sunday, MDR means a trained analyst is already looking at it rather than waiting until Monday morning for someone to notice the alert queue.
MDR closes the gap between having detection tools and having the people to act on them. Its core capabilities include:
IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that organizations using AI and automation in their security operations detected and contained incidents an average of 98 days faster than those that did not. Speed matters because breach lifecycle directly determines breach cost. The same report found that internal detection, meaning your own team or tools catching the threat rather than waiting to be told by an attacker, shortened the data breach lifecycle by 61 days and saved nearly $1 million in costs compared to externally disclosed breaches.
MDR delivers that internal detection advantage without requiring you to build an internal SOC. Building a 24/7 SOC from scratch typically requires an initial infrastructure investment of $1 million to $2 million and annual staffing costs that exceed $1 million per year once you account for the analysts required to maintain continuous coverage. For the vast majority of MSPs and SMBs, that cost is prohibitive. MDR provides equivalent coverage for a predictable per-user or per-endpoint managed service fee.
MDR quality depends entirely on the technology underneath it and the people operating it. MDR built on a narrow EDR platform, one that only sees endpoints, misses threats moving through your network, attacking cloud infrastructure, or targeting user identities. If the detection layer is incomplete, the analyst team can only work with what they can see.
That is the gap XDR was built to close.
XDR, Extended Detection and Response, is a security technology platform that correlates threat data across multiple telemetry sources simultaneously. Traditional endpoint detection and response tools were powerful but siloed: they saw what was happening on the endpoint and nothing else. XDR extends that detection logic across endpoint, network, identity, email, and cloud.
XDR is built for high-fidelity threat detection and rapid, automated response across an integrated environment. Its core capabilities include:
Gartner projected that by 2025, half of all organizations would be using some form of managed detection and response services for continuous threat monitoring, a figure that reflects how unsustainable manual tool management without expert coverage has become. XDR reduces the operational overhead associated with managing point security tools that do not share data with each other, do not correlate findings, and require your team to manually investigate across disconnected dashboards.
For MSPs specifically, XDR built into a multi-tenant platform means you can manage security operations for your entire client base from a single interface rather than logging into separate environments one at a time.
XDR is a technology platform, not a service. It detects threats and can automate response actions, but it does not come with a team. A well-configured XDR deployment with no one watching the queue is no more effective than having no detection at all. XDR also was not designed for compliance-grade log management. If your clients operate in regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, defense contracting, or education, XDR alone does not provide the log retention, audit trails, and continuous monitoring documentation those frameworks require.
This is the core question, and the most common source of confusion in the acronym cluster is treating MDR and XDR as comparable options. They operate on different layers entirely.
MDR is a service. XDR is a technology. MDR provides the people and process layer: analysts watching your environment, investigating alerts, taking or directing response. XDR provides the detection layer: correlated telemetry from across your environment, behavioral analytics, and automated response capability.
MDR without strong underlying detection technology means analysts working with incomplete information. XDR without analyst coverage means sophisticated detection output that no one is acting on. XDR gives a security team better visibility and faster detection across a broader environment; MDR gives organizations without a security team the coverage they need to operate around the clock. Most mature security programs eventually need both.
Both MDR and MXDR are managed services. The difference is what the analyst team is working with.
MDR can be built on almost any underlying technology: a traditional EDR, a legacy SIEM, or a combination of point products. In practice, traditional MDR was built primarily on EDR, which makes it strong on endpoints and weaker on the surfaces that increasingly matter in modern attacks. Credential theft, adversary-in-the-middle attacks, cloud storage exfiltration, and lateral movement through network infrastructure all unfold outside the endpoint. An MDR service built on endpoint-only tooling sees those events after they have already reached a device, if it sees them at all.
MXDR specifically uses XDR as the detection foundation, which extends the analyst team’s visibility across endpoints, network, identity, cloud, and applications simultaneously. More importantly, the platform correlates signals across those surfaces in real time, so threats that move laterally before touching an endpoint still get caught earlier in the attack chain, when containment is cheaper and faster.
MXDR providers also typically include SIEM capabilities within the same platform, giving MSPs and their clients detection, response, and compliance coverage without managing separate tools from separate vendors.
The practical implication for MSPs: if your clients face multi-vector attacks, and most do because attackers pivot across identity, cloud, and endpoints in sequence, an MDR service built on endpoint-only visibility will consistently miss portions of those attack chains.
Most MDR vs. MXDR content available online was written for enterprise buyers managing a single organizational environment. For MSPs managing security across 20, 50, or 100 client environments simultaneously, the calculus is different. The question is not just which tool detects more threats, but which model lets you deliver credible security outcomes to clients without your margins disappearing into infrastructure, staffing, and tool management.
Managing separate SIEM, EDR, MDR, and network security tools across a multi-tenant client base creates integration overhead that eats directly into your margins. Your team spends time stitching together tools that were not designed to talk to each other, correlating alerts across disconnected dashboards, and managing vendor relationships for each component of a stack that should be working as a unit.
According to research published alongside Todyl’s 2025 platform updates, 46 percent of SMBs have experienced a cyberattack, and nearly one in five of those that suffered an attack either filed for bankruptcy or closed their business. Your clients are the businesses in that statistic, and when your security stack has gaps because your tools are not integrated, your clients carry that risk.
Alert fatigue degrades security outcomes in any environment, and in a multi-client MSP environment it compounds. The Omdia State of the SOC 2026 report found that nearly half of all generated alerts prove to be false positives. When that ratio applies across 40 client environments, an internal team without managed triage support spends most of its time chasing noise rather than containing threats.
MXDR addresses this by handling detection and triage on the provider side. Your team receives only high-priority findings with full context, so the noise is filtered before it reaches you.
For MSPs building or scaling a security practice, MXDR built on a unified platform changes the operational model. Instead of managing four or five vendor relationships and integrating their outputs manually, you run a single stack that handles detection, response, compliance reporting, and analyst escalation in one place.
Todyl’s MXDR customers describe what that shift feels like in practice. Paul Havens, CEO of IT Haven: “Before Todyl, we were using about 8 tools per machine, which was a hassle to image and onboard. Now, we just use Todyl and our RMM, and have cut our onboarding time down to less than an hour.” Wayne Stanley, President and CEO of Iron Dome, described it as being able to “deliver better security through a single-pane-of-glass with robust reporting that we didn’t have with multiple vendors.”
That operational efficiency is measurable margin. Fewer tools mean lower licensing overhead. Faster onboarding means lower labor cost per client. Unified reporting means fewer hours per audit cycle.
Building an internal SOC capable of 24/7 multi-surface coverage across endpoint, network, identity, and cloud telemetry requires continuous analyst staffing, deep expertise across multiple threat categories, a mature automation stack, and the operational discipline to tune detection rules and playbooks on an ongoing basis. Todyl’s own analysis puts the cost of staffing and maintaining an in-house SOC at more than $2.5 million annually.
For most MSPs managing small-to-midsize client bases, that number does not fit the unit economics of a managed services business. MXDR converts that capital and operational expense into a predictable per-client service fee that scales with the client base and reaches operational maturity from day one rather than after a multi-year internal build.
The MDR market is projected to grow from $3.3 billion in 2023 to $9.5 billion by 2028, a compound annual growth rate of 23.3 percent. Many of the organizations driving that growth are MSPs who have recognized that managed detection and response is a revenue-generating service they can deliver at scale without staffing a dedicated SOC.
An MXDR service collects event data from everywhere: endpoint agents capturing process and file activity, network sensors capturing traffic and lateral movement, identity providers logging authentication events, cloud platforms logging access and configuration changes, and applications generating their own security telemetry.
The breadth of that ingestion determines what the service can see and act on, and gaps in telemetry coverage become gaps in protection. An attacker who compromises a cloud identity and moves through network infrastructure before ever touching a managed endpoint is invisible to a service that only ingests endpoint data.
Raw telemetry alone does not produce useful detections. The MXDR platform runs correlation logic and behavioral analysis across all those sources continuously, looking for patterns that indicate threat activity: not just known malware signatures, but behavioral anomalies that match attacker techniques catalogued in the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
A single failed login is not worth surfacing. Forty-seven failed logins across three accounts from the same foreign IP address, followed by a successful authentication at 2am, followed by cloud storage access from an account that has never touched that data before, is a sequence worth an analyst’s immediate attention. The correlation layer assembles that sequence automatically.
When a detection crosses a confidence threshold, it reaches the analyst team. Experienced analysts bring judgment that automated rules cannot fully replicate: they understand attacker intent, recognize patterns from previous incidents across the provider’s entire client base, and can act quickly with confidence.
Pre-authorized response playbooks let the analyst team contain confirmed threats without waiting for client approval. In a ransomware scenario where encryption can propagate across a network in minutes, that pre-authorization structure is the difference between one affected device and a full environment recovery event.
A common complaint about managed security services is opacity: you pay for coverage but have little visibility into what is happening. A well-designed MXDR service addresses this directly. Cases should be visible in a shared portal with full event context, MITRE ATT&CK mappings for detected techniques, and documentation of every action the analyst team has taken.
That transparency keeps the MSP and their clients informed and in control, and it creates the audit trail that compliance frameworks require: documented evidence of continuous monitoring, rapid detection, and structured incident response.
The label “MXDR” gets applied to a wide range of services, some significantly more complete than others. A full-scope MXDR offering covers:
Todyl MXDR delivers 24/7 expert security coverage at a fraction of the cost of building and operating an in-house SOC. It is built natively on the Todyl Security Platform, a unified architecture that integrates SASE (Secure Access Service Edge), AI-Powered Managed Cloud SIEM, EDR/NGAV (endpoint detection and response and next-generation antivirus), SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response), and GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) into a single-agent, cloud-native solution.
That integration matters in a practical way. When Todyl’s MXDR analysts investigate a case, they are not correlating signals pulled from fragmented tools with different data schemas. Every relevant signal, from endpoint telemetry to network events to identity activity to cloud logs, flows into a single platform, which makes investigations faster and correlation stronger.
Todyl’s analyst team monitors your environment continuously, every hour of every day. That unified telemetry depth is what allowed Todyl’s detection engineers to identify credential exfiltration and a potential ransomware deployment in a client environment on a Sunday afternoon, catching the attack chain across multiple signals before any device was encrypted. The cost savings were estimated at 85 percent relative to paying a ransom, with zero downtime for the client.
Todyl’s detection engineers continuously update and tune the platform, including the Anomaly Detection Framework, global SASE rules, and EDR detections, to stay ahead of new and emerging threats. Detection improves continuously based on findings across Todyl’s entire partner ecosystem, creating what the platform calls herd immunity: when a new attack pattern surfaces in one client environment, detections get updated across all tenants without each partner managing their own threat intelligence pipeline.
Todyl MXDR includes ITDR, delivering 24/7 protection from advanced identity-based attacks including Adversary-in-the-Middle attacks (AitM) and Account Takeovers (ATOs), with continuous monitoring of cloud identities and rapid containment. Identity is the attack surface that most MDR solutions miss entirely, because traditional EDR has no visibility into identity providers.
Every partner has full access to all open cases in the Todyl portal, including detailed event context, MITRE ATT&CK technique mapping, and recommended or one-click response actions.
Steven Giacoppo, Founder and President of MJN Technology Services, described a direct experience with this: “The visibility from SIEM and the support from Todyl’s MXDR team were extremely helpful during a stressful time.”
Every Todyl MXDR customer is assigned a dedicated Detection and Response Account Manager with a minimum of five years of cybersecurity experience, available through preferred communication channels including Slack, Teams, and email. Your DRAM coordinates real-time threat response during active incidents and collaborates with your team on strategic security initiatives through monthly or quarterly joint planning sessions. During active incidents, that DRAM works directly with the MSP through detection, response, and remediation rather than through a ticketing queue.
Brian Guenther, President and CEO of Exceed Cybersecurity and IT Services, framed this partnership clearly: “We rely on their expertise, and we can always turn to them with any questions. Working with Todyl feels like a true partnership because they make time for us, listen, and implement our feedback.”
Security and operational efficiency are connected directly through the cost of downtime, the burden of incident response, and the overhead of compliance.
MTTR, Mean Time to Respond, measures how quickly your security team detects a threat and takes action to contain it. IBM’s 2024 data found that organizations with AI and automation-assisted security detected and contained breaches 98 days faster than those without those capabilities. MXDR delivers that speed advantage through an analyst team that is never off-shift and a detection platform that correlates telemetry in real time rather than waiting for a human to manually correlate logs.
When an incident happens, response time and documentation quality determine both the financial impact and the regulatory outcome. Todyl MXDR provides a full Critical Incident Report with key data insights, timelines, and security recommendations. Your assigned DRAM works with you live during the incident rather than via a delayed email chain, so remediation moves faster and the post-incident documentation is already structured for disclosure or audit requirements.
For MSPs managing clients in healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, or defense contracting, compliance is not optional. Frameworks like HIPAA, SOC 2, CMMC, and NIST all require evidence of continuous monitoring, log retention, and incident response capability. Todyl MXDR, operating on the same Managed Cloud SIEM your team uses, provides the documentation trail, audit-ready reporting, and continuous monitoring posture those frameworks require, without a separate compliance tool or additional audit preparation cycle.
MXDR serves a specific operational profile well, and being clear about the fit conditions is more useful than recommending it universally.
Choose MDR when you have an existing security stack with solid endpoint coverage, your primary gap is analyst coverage and 24/7 monitoring, and your environment does not yet require cross-source telemetry correlation across identity, cloud, or network layers.
Choose MXDR when you want broad coverage across endpoint, network, identity, and cloud without assembling and managing multiple vendors; you want a managed service that includes both the detection technology and the analyst team; you need compliance-grade log management and audit reporting without managing a separate SIEM; you want detection engineering, platform tuning, and threat hunting off your team’s operational plate; or you are an MSP scaling that capability across multiple clients without the margin erosion that comes from managing multiple vendor stacks.
MXDR fits less well when your organization has a fully staffed internal SOC and wants granular, proprietary control over detection logic; your environment is simple enough that endpoint-focused MDR covers your threat profile; or your compliance requirements involve specific data custody arrangements that complicate third-party managed platform access.
For the vast majority of MSPs and the SMBs they serve, the case for MXDR holds. The exceptions describe large enterprise security programs, and even those increasingly consume MXDR to extend coverage rather than replace their internal capabilities.
The label does not guarantee consistent service quality. When evaluating providers, ask specifically:
Todyl is a cybersecurity platform built for MSPs and SMBs that unifies SASE, SIEM, EDR/NGAV, MXDR, SOAR, and GRC into a single-agent solution. John Nellen, Founder and CEO of Todyl, described the mission directly: “Unlike endpoint-first, detection-focused MDR/EDR offerings, the Todyl platform unifies prevention, detection, response, and compliance across network, cloud, endpoint, and identity, helping partners stop attacks earlier, cut dwell time, and resolve incidents faster while consolidating their stack and improving margins.”
MXDR stands for Managed eXtended Detection and Response. It is a fully managed security service that combines XDR technology, which correlates threat data across endpoint, network, identity, cloud, and email, with 24/7 human analyst coverage. MXDR providers operate a security operations center on your behalf, delivering threat detection, investigation, and response without requiring you to build or staff an in-house SOC.
MDR is a managed service that provides analyst coverage and incident response around the clock; the technology underneath it is variable, but traditional MDR is typically built on EDR, which focuses on endpoints. XDR is a technology platform that extends detection across multiple sources including endpoint, network, identity, and cloud, using behavioral analytics and automated response, but it does not include a team. MXDR combines both: XDR technology operated as a managed service, providing broader coverage than MDR and the human expertise that XDR alone does not include.
MDR is a service that provides analyst coverage and response. XDR is a technology platform for detection and response. XDR requires your own team to operate it; MDR brings the team. The two are complementary, since XDR improves detection quality and MDR provides the coverage to act on it.
For MSPs, the core difference is the scope of protection you can deliver to clients and the operational model behind it. MDR built on EDR covers endpoints. MXDR covers endpoint, network, identity, cloud, and email, making it a more complete security offering. MXDR platforms built for MSPs also include multi-tenant management, unified reporting, and integrated compliance documentation, which reduces the operational overhead of managing security across dozens of client environments.
Many MXDR platforms, including Todyl’s, include SIEM capabilities natively: log collection, retention, compliance reporting, and forensic query. Todyl MXDR operates out of the same Managed Cloud SIEM that your team uses, giving you log management, compliance reporting, and analyst-driven detection in a single integrated service. If you need compliance-grade log management and your MXDR service does not include SIEM, you will need to address that separately.
MXDR reduces alert fatigue in two ways. First, the XDR detection layer uses behavioral analytics and vendor-managed detection models rather than static rules, which produces fewer false positives than rule-based SIEM correlation. Second, the analyst team triages all alerts before escalating to your team, so you only see confirmed threats with full context rather than a raw queue of thousands of events. Todyl’s detection engineering team also tunes detections continuously based on findings across its entire partner ecosystem, improving accuracy over time for every customer on the platform.
Todyl MXDR operates on the Todyl Security Platform, which consolidates SASE, SIEM, EDR/NGAV, SOAR, and GRC into a single-agent solution. For most organizations, this replaces multiple individual tools with one unified platform. You can also integrate existing or third-party security tools into the Todyl SIEM to expand MXDR coverage across tools you choose to retain.
For most SMBs and the MSPs that serve them, MXDR is the most practical path to comprehensive, continuous security coverage. Building an in-house SOC with equivalent capabilities requires more than $2.5 million annually in personnel alone. MXDR delivers that coverage at a fraction of the cost, with no upfront infrastructure investment and no hiring risk.
Building a 24/7 SOC from scratch typically requires an initial infrastructure investment of $1 million to $2 million and annual staffing costs exceeding $1 million per year to maintain continuous coverage. MXDR delivers equivalent or superior coverage as a managed service at a predictable per-user or per-endpoint fee, with no capital expenditure or staffing overhead.
The most important questions: Which telemetry sources does the service actually cover? Can the provider take containment actions under pre-authorized playbooks? Is SIEM included or separate? Does the platform support multi-tenant management? Is there a named resource assigned to your environment? Can you see everything the provider is doing in a shared portal? The answers determine whether you are buying real managed coverage or a managed alert forwarding service.
ITDR, Identity Threat Detection and Response, is coverage specifically targeting identity-based attacks: adversary-in-the-middle attacks, account takeovers, credential abuse, and cloud identity compromise. As attackers increasingly target identities rather than endpoints as their initial access vector, ITDR has become a critical component of complete MXDR coverage. Todyl MXDR includes ITDR for platforms including Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
The MDR market is growing toward $9.5 billion by 2028 because managing disconnected tools without expert coverage produces outcomes that are measurably worse and operationally unsustainable. The managed security services market broadly is projected to reach $66.83 billion by 2030. Organizations that figure out how to deliver managed protection at scale, whether as MSPs or as enterprises, win on both security outcomes and operational efficiency.
MXDR is where that convergence lives: a single managed service that covers your environment broadly, responds to threats continuously, and scales without requiring you to build the infrastructure or hire the team that makes it possible.
Todyl MXDR is ready to deliver expert detection and response on day one, with a highly trained 24/7 analyst team, a dedicated Detection and Response Account Manager, and a platform that unifies endpoint, network, identity, and cloud protection in a single pane of glass.
If you manage security for an MSP, an SMB, or a client portfolio and want to see exactly how Todyl consolidates your stack while delivering SOC-grade protection, book a demo to see Todyl MXDR in action or explore Todyl’s packages to find the right coverage model for your business.
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