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CRITICALSTART vs Secureworks Taegis Managed XDR / MDR comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Binary Defense MDR
Sponsored
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
7th
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
CRITICALSTART
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
32nd
Average Rating
9.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (30th)
Secureworks Taegis Managed ...
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Managed Security Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2024, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of Binary Defense MDR is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.7%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Secureworks Taegis Managed XDR / MDR is 5.9%, down from 7.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
 

Featured Reviews

PF
Jul 1, 2024
Saves money, helps reduce false positives, and has excellent customization capabilities
Sometimes, something may not install right; however, whenever we have challenges, they are very solution-oriented and ready to figure things out. While my understanding is that they're working on this, I would like to see some more of the quantification or reporting. They're working on better detecting the impact they're having and what they're working on. That's an area they should continue to focus on. Having those metrics will be valuable. They just need to continue to be focused on Open MDR, and on being open to many tools and being broadly compatible across tool sets if possible. That's unique, and it is a differentiator in the marketplace.
BF
Aug 17, 2020
Offers the ability to close review tickets or alerts through a mobile phone and to interact with engineers on their side via the app
They could dig a little bit deeper into the Splunk alerts when they feel like they need to be escalated to us. For example, if a locked account shows up, they could do a little extra digging to verify that the locked account was due to a bad password on the local system. They could just do a little extra digging within the Splunk environment instead of pushing it onto us to go do that extra little digging. We actually created dashboards for our help desk group to be able to hunt down locked down accounts. We've asked CRITICALSTART to start using that as a means of validating the lockdown accounts before they just start escalating them to us. If we go down the endpoint protection route, then I could probably have other input after I've used that for a while.
SL
Jun 21, 2023
Offers proactive threat hunting and actively examines our environment
With SecureWorks, we have an incident retainer. So if there's an event, they bring in people to handle a formal incident, and we have a certain amount of hours we can use. Sometimes, it feels like they're milking the retainer a little bit. They tend to involve people who don't necessarily need to be part of the incident or call it for false positives now and then. It hasn't cost us anything, so it's just a minor issue. We've never exceeded our retainer amount. But, it seems a little bit inefficient sometimes. Secureworks's support integration is really nice. Secureworks's integrations are quite good. So, in future releases, reporting could be a little bit better in terms of what has happened, but we're able to get what we need out of it. It's just that it's not as far along as it could be.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The speed at which their services are reactive is valuable. Nowadays, when a threat hits an endpoint, you've got minutes, not hours or days. Their average response time is about four minutes on an alert. For anything that needs to be sent to us, it's about fourteen minutes, which is pretty good. They're the third SOC that I've used in fifteen years. By far, they are the quickest ones to act. When you're looking at prevention, that's a key factor."
"The most valuable feature is reviewing tickets and the notes added by technicians."
"The most valuable features are the SIEM and the ticketing function; the latter is very smooth and easy to read and understand. We don't have any issues looking at the ticketing information when we're trying to identify what's going on."
"With Binary Defense, we don't just get an alert, but also a detailed rundown of why they're alerting us on it. They tell us what was executed, or the username, script, or IP. That way, we're not wasting time investigating."
"Binary Defense is comprehensive. We see most of the questionable activity. Once you see things a couple of times and are familiar with the processes, you know what those are. The level of activity is definitely favorable."
"The biggest aspect for us is that they are able to conform to our environment and utilize our tools. That way, we still maintain ownership of all the data and access to the applications, and we never lose control of the ability to run the solution ourselves if we need to."
"The case interface is Binary Defense MDR's most valuable feature."
"One of the main benefits of Binary Defense MDR is the ability to easily meet with their support team to discuss any issues we encounter."
"The main difference between the other options and this one is the quality of the personnel within the SOC. It's their knowledge and depth and the way they handle customers."
"The quick interaction between the agents is the most valuable feature. If we have questions, they're quick to answer. If we make a change to our system, they quickly make the changes that are necessary to filter the logs correctly."
"The new mobile app is awesome. It is one of the best I've ever seen. It's much better than its predecessor. It's more intuitive, a whole lot easier to navigate and get where you need to go. It's less repetitive and just generally easier to use. It allows me to not have to be sitting at my computer all the time. I can be on my phone or tablet or wherever I'm at. It makes it a lot easier to answer tickets and do that kind of thing."
"Outside of using the platform to manage alerts, the feature of the service that we get the most value from is being able to reach out to them and say, "Hey, we might go buy a SIEM," for example. They give us their overview of what's out there, what they've dealt with, what they integrate with, and what that looks like. That's been pretty powerful over the years for us."
"My impression of the transparency of the data is that it has good detail. It allows you to see how many events have come in, how many of those events have made it down to their analysts to review, and then however many from their analysts to be able to close out, have been able to been escalated to us. It's a good metric that we can share with my management. They see the value of what the SOC is bringing on top of what my team is already doing."
"There are two parts of CRITICALSTART's services that are most valuable to us. The MDR solution where they monitor our computers, laptops, and users across the board; and their knowledge of Palo Alto firewalls."
"From where we were prior to going into them, the service has increased our analysts’ efficiency to the point that they can focus on other areas of the business. It gives me the ability to allow analysts to do Level 3 and 4 work and stay out of the weeds of the alerts, where you tend to get alert fatigue. The service takes care of much of the Tier 1 and Tier 2 triage. It is more effective than what we had been used to, because it allows the filtering of Level 1 and Level 2 type alerts to be taken care of. This leaves less for us to handle, which is a good thing."
"There is a team of people who monitor our traffic and processes 24/7, so if anything raises a flag or alert, it will escalate back to me right away. That's the most incredible part: Humans working behind the scenes 24/7 to monitor our networks."
"The most valuable feature is the support. The support chat. It's always connecting to people. And you open the chat, and it's not about that automated response. It's actually a human being that responds to you."
"This solution gathers the information logs from all devices and correlates all the information. It notifies us of any critical events taking place across our networks which has been valuable."
"It provides more visibility and more control over endpoints. It reduces the noise. It clears things and only shows things that are really important. It only shows those things that need to be looked at or need to be investigated further. Other similar solutions give you a lot of alerts and other things, but Secureworks gives you a defined or less noisy view so that you can work or focus on things that are important in terms of investigation, response, and remediation."
"We can easily isolate affected machines in the network."
"The pricing is flexible."
"The most valuable feature is the fast alerting and response time."
"We don't have a full SOC, so it's helpful to have them sifting through our alerts and only bringing actionable items to us."
"There are some patent pending detectors within the platform that provides a lot of value."
 

Cons

"The most significant area for improvement is in support for non-English speakers; we're a global organization, so many of our users are not English speakers, which can make interacting with them a challenge. There's no Chinese language support, so we must rely on what we can do with the internet. We don't expect Binary Defense to build a language staff, but details can get lost in translation when we assume the whole world speaks English."
"The only area I see for improvement with Binary Defense is their service portal. It could benefit from some enhancements."
"I would like to get more reports from Binary Defense about what they're blocking."
"We found a couple of bugs in the user interface."
"While my understanding is that they're working on this, I would like to see some more of the quantification or reporting."
"It's hard to think of anything that they need to improve on, but just to point out something, I would like to see them provide advanced XDR."
"It's sometimes difficult to know when to engage Binary Defense or TrustedSec, their sister company. TrustedSec is more focused on offensive security, as opposed to the defensive security that the MDR solution provides. It would be awesome if there were a better bridge between that relationship for when we need to get more proactive services or when we need to do a penetration test."
"If I were shopping for an MDR solution today, I would not only look for a company that has the ability to alert, detect, and remediate, but also the ability to integrate vulnerability management. That's a big thing that they're lacking today."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"The biggest room for improvement is not necessarily in their service or offering, but in the products that they support. I would like them to further their knowledge and ability to integrate with those tools. They have base integrations with everything, and we haven't come across anything. They should just continue to build on that API interface between their applications and other third-party consoles."
"They just did a user interface overhaul to the website portal that you use for troubleshooting tickets. The old one was fine. The new one is not intuitive..."
"They could dig a little bit deeper into the Splunk alerts when they feel like they need to be escalated to us. For example, if a locked account shows up, they could do a little extra digging to verify that the locked account was due to a bad password on the local system. They could just do a little extra digging within the Splunk environment instead of pushing it onto us to go do that extra little digging."
"It has frustrated us that they don't have a native Slack integration, because most things do now. That's something we've asked for, for years, and it just doesn't really seem like it's a priority."
"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"In terms of responsiveness, when I open up an alert, sometimes it takes a bit of time to load. However, it only happened once or twice."
"The only thing I can think of that I would like to see, and I'm sure they could work this into a service pretty easily, is not only alerts on issues that are affecting my company, but some threat intelligence of a general nature on what's out there in the environment. That might be a nice add-in."
"The integration with the Carbon Black sensor could be better. ManagedXDR doesn't seem to know how to extract the forensic data from an endpoint that was quarantined by Carbon Black."
"Tamper-proofing or tamper protection is still pending in Secureworks. Tamper protection will make it more secure. If I'm an admin of a device, I can uninstall an agent without the knowledge of the security or Secureworks admin. If someone gets hold of one endpoint with admin credentials, he can remove anything, and an organization will lose visibility. They need to work on providing more visibility across endpoints. A couple of times it has happened that the cloak agent is there, but it did not get activated, or there were some issues. The machine was restarted, but the cloak agent didn't run. In such cases, you have to troubleshoot. It is a big issue if a cyber attack is happening, and your machine is rebooted, but the events are not captured."
"In the next release of this solution, I would like to see file integrity monitoring."
"We did a PoC of their next-gen antivirus product, but it wasn't ready yet. It was underdeveloped and caused a lot of issues. We'd like to move away from Carbon Black, but they said that it's probably still not to a point where we'd be happy with it. Carbon Black and RedCloak seem to work fine for us."
"This solution could be improved with a higher degree of automation such as automated emails, triggers and defining the severity of the cases."
"The integration would look better with other products, with other EDRs, with other firewalls, with other older versions of firewalls, and the versions of software and hardware."
"Dell Secureworks is for higher-end customers and it's not quite as straightforward to implement or to get up and running as some of the other solutions."
"The deployment could definitely be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"From the initial cost that Binary Defense came in with, we pared it down quite a bit over the course of 30 or 60 days. My leadership would say that their cost was high, but realistically, they were in line with the market."
"The pricing is on target. Working with their sales team on pricing negotiations was a pleasant process. They were very respectful of the constraints we had and I feel that we're paying a fair price."
"It's valued at the right price. Even with the number of endpoints we have, we don't feel that it's a lot more than any competitor. In fact, it might be less expensive when you look at the fact that you're getting a full flex SOC out of it along with the tools."
"After we acquired this platform, we met with a number of different vendors. Binary Defense came in with a proposal that was surprisingly affordable. In fact, we were able to recoup the cost of their services within a short period of time. This is because Binary Defense is able to provide the same level of security as a team of two or three in-house analysts but at a fraction of the cost. As a result, Binary Defense is saving us an estimated $250,000 to $300,000 per year."
"The pricing isn't that bad, it's very competitive. I don't feel that it's over-priced and I don't feel that it's under-priced."
"The solution's price is spot on; if anything, it's slightly below the norm for most services. Compared to building the same team internally, it would cost more to create the same amount of capability than what we get from an external team. Price-wise, Binary Defense is in a great spot."
"Binary Defense MDR is priced competitively and may be slightly lower than CrowdStrike."
"Binary Defense has changed its pricing model from being primarily based on the volume of data to one based on escalations and incidents they handle."
"There are contractual penalties if their SLAs are not met. This commitment was very important in our decision to go with this service, because not having downtime is extremely important to us. The providers has not missed an SLA in the 18 months that I have worked with them."
"The pricing has always been competitive. They have always been good to us. They will make it a fight. They don't try to hide anything; it's always been fully transparent and well-worth what we pay for it."
"I've told CRITICALSTART that I think the managed service they provide is cheaper than it should be. It's a really good deal."
"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
"As far as the expense goes, it's very competitive pricing and the services you get are almost like you have a person on your team."
"Overall, for what I'm paying for it, and the benefit I'm getting out of it, it is right where it needs to be, if not a little bit in my favor. For what it costs me to actually have this service, I could afford one internal person to do that job, but now I have a team of 10 or more who are doing that job, and they don't sleep because they work shifts."
"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
"The Red Cloak agent is free."
"It is expensive but there is no better product than this."
"Initially, the cost was going to be something around $160 or $170. And eventually, I think they brought it down to $110 and they also threw in some endpoint protection platforms."
"The price is kind of on par. The licensing was comparable to other solutions. It's not particularly high or low."
"Secureworks Taegis ManagedXDR is very expensive and could be more cost-effective."
"The pricing for this solution is reasonable. One agent costs approximately 270 dirhams/70 USD for one year. There is a reduction in cost per licence as the number of licences used increases."
"The pricing of Dell Secureworks is very reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Retailer
8%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Binary Defense MDR?
The most valuable feature is reviewing tickets and the notes added by technicians.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Binary Defense MDR?
The pricing is very competitive; it's on par with or below others. For those sensitive to pricing, I'd advise that th...
What needs improvement with Binary Defense MDR?
Sometimes, something may not install right; however, whenever we have challenges, they are very solution-oriented and...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about Secureworks Taegis ManagedXDR?
The most valuable feature is the support. The support chat. It's always connecting to people. And you open the chat, ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Secureworks Taegis ManagedXDR?
It is worth the money. It is expensive but there is no better product than this.
What needs improvement with Secureworks Taegis ManagedXDR?
The integration would look better with other products, with other EDRs, with other firewalls, with other older versio...
 

Also Known As

Binary Defense Vision, Binary Defense Managed Detection and Response, Binary Defense Managed Detection & Response
Critical Start, CriticalStart
Secureworks Red Cloak Managed Detection and Response, Dell Secureworks, SecureWorks Taegis Managed TDR
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Securitas USA, Black Hills Energy, Lincoln Electric,The J.M. Smuckers Company, New York Community Bank, State of Connecticut, NCR
Information Not Available
RICOH, Owens and Minor
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. Secureworks Taegis Managed XDR / MDR and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.
800,688 professionals have used our research since 2012.