Artificial intelligence is accelerating digital transformation across the enterprise at an unprecedented rate. The 2026 Global Threat Landscape Report from Fortinet identifies that pace as a 26% increase in total attack activity year over year, with 49% of attacks abusing legitimate tools. Criminals are now using AI to automate reconnaissance, create more elaborate phishing campaigns and evade traditional tools. This is widening the gap between attacker capabilities and enterprise defenses. But managed detection and response (MDR) services fill that gap, helping to protect companies from threats.
“AI turns attacker prompts into working code, which collapses timelines to hours, not days. Defenders still run on people, process, approvals and shift changes, and the gap will continue to widen until our defenses can move at the same speed as attackers,” says Jeff Pollard, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. “MDR turns telemetry plus expertise into actual detection, investigation and response at a scale companies can't build on their own.”
Here’s how to think through adding MDR to close the gap and defend the enterprise.
How MDR Helps Enterprises
As AI creates a new attack surface for adversaries to target, the primary accelerant is the speed of attack creation and execution, according to Dave Gruber, a principal analyst with Omdia. This outpaces traditional human defenses, causing enterprises to have to fight AI with AI. “This incentivizes most to invest in more machine-driven mechanisms that can speed triage, investigation and response,” he says. For example, the Fortinet report notes that the median time from the disclosure of a vulnerability to exploitation is 24 hours. And for those still thinking it won’t happen to them, in 2025, FortiGuard Labs observed 122 billion exploitation attempts.
“Most providers offer proactive services, including vulnerability management, pen testing, cyber resilience readiness, tabletops and more. As AI is inserted into most of the IT operating environment, MDR providers are further helping security leaders spin up new security capabilities to monitor and defend AI operating infrastructure,” Gruber says.
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MDR is stepping in as a solution to already short-staffed IT teams. It can integrate with broader digital ecosystems to protect critical customer data and ensure trust in digital engagement initiatives. “While cloud-knowledgeable security talent has been an ongoing problem, higher-level skills in areas like threat detection engineering, security architecture and incident response have plagued many organizations,” Gruber says. “The good news is that recent advancements in the application of both generative AI and agentic AI are helping to quickly resolve many of these skills shortages.”
However, he notes concerns with lower-level security functions impacting the learning and development process to grow more experienced security personnel, further exacerbating the shortage of highly trained, upper-level cybersecurity experts available.
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Who Benefits Most From MDR?
As with any cybersecurity solution, it’s key to research whether MDR will really solve your specific problems, and how it will fit into the wider landscape of cybersecurity for your enterprise.
“MDR is especially valuable for mid-market and enterprise organizations that have complex environments, limited in-house cybersecurity resources or a need to strengthen resilience without building a full security operations center from the ground up,” says Jason Stading, director of cybersecurity at ISG in Frisco, Texas.
Stading shares that beyond tactical security, MDR can become a strategic enabler by “improving visibility, reducing risk exposure and helping organizations respond faster in an AI-driven threat environment.” This might include correlating alerts across endpoint, cloud, identity and network environments. “This helps prevent teams from wasting time chasing noise so they can focus on the incidents that matter most.”
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Pain Points and Challenges of MDR
No solution is perfect. “The biggest issues come down to trust and ownership. Customers and MDR providers have to define who acts and who decides, and have to work together over time to understand each other,” Pollard says. Yet the benefits might outweigh these risks, when carefully researched and considered. “The best ROI story is time, measured in double-digit hours returned per incident lifecycle. When you strip out toil and drudgery, your team moves from chasing alerts to actually improving security. Second-best is security posture improvement over time,” he says.
As with any tool, MDR is not a standalone solution, he warns, but another layer of security in a broader digital ecosystem. He also points to concerns around limited internal expertise, tool sprawl, poor integration, and the disconnect that can happen between security priorities and business goals.
“The best way to address these challenges is to align MDR with business outcomes, ensure it integrates with existing platforms and workflows, and choose a provider that can act as an extension of the internal team,” he says. “Done well, MDR allows IT leaders to shift from constant firefighting to higher-value strategic work, while still strengthening the organization’s ability to detect, respond and adapt at scale.”
In choosing an MDR provider, Pollard advises, “Buy MDR for outcomes. Providers should be able to show how they save time, improve response and improve security posture.”
