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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) (29th)
Secureworks Taegis Managed ...
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
9th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of Binary Defense MDR is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Secureworks Taegis Managed XDR / MDR is 5.6%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
 

Featured Reviews

Rich Ullom - PeerSpot reviewer
May 1, 2023
Worth the money, fantastic communication, and fast service with an average response time of about four minutes on an alert
This is my third SOC. I have never had anybody react as well. So, it's hard for me to provide something that they could do better because I'm really happy with them. I just signed another three-year contract with them. I don't find any downside to them, but if I have to put one, it would be consistent manpower or staffing. The only area where the solution can be improved is going to be with people. As they grow, they are struggling with the same thing that every other company is, which is getting talent and getting that talent to stay, but they've just revised their tiering system to go from a flat analyst and manager to a three-tier solution where it goes through two or three before it gets elevated. That seems to have worked out well, so if one level misses it, the next one picks it up, and it works out fine. Consistent staffing is the only challenge they have because when you're hiring level-one analysts, you go through them pretty quickly. You'll probably hire them at 50K or 55K, and after they do it for a year, they find out they can make 85K somewhere else, and they bounce. So, their turnover is a little high, but that's it.
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.
Tom Kar - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 25, 2023
Has a user-friendly setup process, but its query language needs improvement
The product has valuable features for the EDR section. We can easily isolate affected machines in the network. It helps us prevent the spreading of malware or ransomware further Secureworks Taegis ManagedXDR's query language and stability need improvement. Additionally, its price could be better…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Binary Defense has a human service department that provides live monitoring for our systems."
"Binary Defense's most valuable feature is the 24/7 monitoring and threat hunting. Their team checks the latest breaches and how they're done."
"The most valuable part of Binary Defense is its team of cybersecurity analysts. Their analysts filter out the noise and only forward the critical threats that require a response instead of false positives."
"Among the valuable features are the agent, continuous reporting, and dashboard. It has all the features we need and we haven't had to customize it, other than turning on certain features that we wanted."
"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 best part about Binary Defense MDR is that it runs on everything, and they keep an eye on things 24/7."
"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 case interface is Binary Defense MDR's most valuable feature."
"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 most valuable feature of their service is their tuning... If we were getting 1,000 alerts a day without them, they tune it until they know what to do for 999 of them, and one will make it through to us per day. That tuning is the most valuable part of their solution."
"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."
"Their Zero Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP) engine, which is kind of their correlation engine, is by far and away one of the best in the business. We can filter and utilize different lists to build out different alerts, such as, what to alert on and when not to alert. This engine helps reduce our number of alerts and false positives."
"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."
"I also use their mobile app. It's very easy to use and very convenient to be able to respond to alerts wherever you are. I love the app. You can respond and communicate, per ticket, with their SOC in near real-time. The response is very quick."
"Customer service and their response are phenomenal. I would give their customer support a nine point five (out of 10). Our easy access to their SOC analyst, sales team, and leadership team instills confidence in me that they are there for us 24/7."
"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 initial setup was very straight forward."
"We can easily isolate affected machines in the network."
"The solution definitely made us way more aware of the possibilities out there."
"The pricing is flexible."
"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."
"The most valuable features are IDS and IPS."
"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."
 

Cons

"Binary Defense MDR could be even better with additional features, like automatic scans and file quarantine."
"We should be able to isolate devices faster. They should shorten the time between clicking on a device to contain it and carrying out the action. That would be a welcome improvement."
"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."
"While my understanding is that they're working on this, I would like to see some more of the quantification or reporting."
"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."
"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."
"We found that an earlier version of the agent had high memory usage and that was a bit concerning, but we raised the concern with their support team and they immediately replied that they had noticed the same thing and had a candidate fix already available... it totally fixed the issue."
"The only area I see for improvement with Binary Defense is their service portal. It could benefit from some enhancements."
"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."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"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."
"During the six-month integration and rollout, there were some bumpy roads along the way. There were communication breakdowns between the project manager, CRITICALSTART leadership, and us (as the customer). I expressed my displeasure during the integration in their inability to effectively communicate when there were holdups or issues. They were going through some growing pains at that time, but they have been right there for us ever since."
"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..."
"The updated UI is actually pretty bad. Regarding the intuitiveness, it is fairly easy to use, but the responsiveness, on a scale of one to 10, is a one. It's really poor performance."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"In terms of ROI, I'd be surprised if there is any investment return on the SIM."
"Dell Secureworks could improve its integration with other third-party solutions."
"This solution could be improved with a higher degree of automation such as automated emails, triggers and defining the severity of the cases."
"In the next release of this solution, I would like to see file integrity monitoring."
"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."
 

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."
"Binary Defense MDR is priced competitively and may be slightly lower than CrowdStrike."
"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 has changed its pricing model from being primarily based on the volume of data to one based on escalations and incidents they handle."
"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."
"The pricing is very good. They are definitely competitive and they were lower at the time that we went with them."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"The Red Cloak agent is free."
"Secureworks Taegis ManagedXDR is very expensive and could be more cost-effective."
"The price is kind of on par. The licensing was comparable to other solutions. It's not particularly high or low."
"The pricing of Dell Secureworks is very reasonable."
"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 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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Healthcare Company
9%
Retailer
8%
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
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...
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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: October 2024.
814,763 professionals have used our research since 2012.