Managed Endpoint Detection and Response
Signature-based antivirus stopped working when attackers stopped writing malware to disk. Petronella Technology Group deploys, tunes, and runs the EDR layer for organizations that need behavior-level visibility on every workstation, server, and laptop. Cross-platform agents. 24/7 hybrid AI plus human SOC. Compliance-tuned for CMMC Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3, HIPAA, PCI-DSS v4.0.1, and SOC 2.
Already running EDR but the alert console is shouting at no one? Most organizations that buy EDR never staff the analyst pod that gives it meaning. Petronella Technology Group provides the missing layer: triage, tuning, threat hunting, and after-hours response. If you need the broader correlation stack across network, cloud, identity, and email, see the Managed XDR service overview or the Managed XDR Suite bundle anatomy. This page is the EDR-focused engagement.
Endpoint detection and response is the technical control layer that watches every device for behavior that signature-based antivirus cannot see. Modern attacks are fileless. They live in memory, abuse legitimate system tools like PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation, ride in on signed binaries, and pivot from one credential to the next without ever writing a recognizable malware artifact to disk. The detection has to happen in the running process, not the static file. That is the job EDR was built for.
Buying an EDR product without staffing the analyst layer behind it produces a familiar pattern: alerts pile up, tuning never gets done, the dashboard becomes background noise, and the first time the platform catches a real incident no one notices for hours. Petronella Technology Group runs the whole thing. We deploy the agent, baseline your environment, write the suppression rules, hunt across the telemetry on a recurring cadence, and answer every escalation a real customer-impacting alert produces. You get a working detection program, not a license bill.
The artificial intelligence layer that prioritizes alerts runs on our enterprise private AI cluster. That cluster sits on hardware Petronella owns, operates, and physically controls. Your alert metadata, behavioral baselines, and forensic queries process there and nowhere else. If a vendor pitches you a "private tenant" inside a public-cloud-hosted large-language-model service, ask where the model weights live and who has root on the inference nodes. The honest answer is rarely the same as the marketing answer.
Endpoint Detection and Response, Defined
A working definition that survives contact with reality. EDR is a continuous monitoring discipline plus a response capability, not a product category that can be reduced to a logo.
Endpoint detection and response is the practice of capturing high-fidelity behavioral telemetry from every endpoint in an environment, correlating that telemetry against known attack patterns and behavioral baselines, and acting on detected threats within seconds. The four pillars are visibility, detection, response, and forensics. A real EDR program does all four; a partial program does some and skips the rest, which is why so many organizations get breached while running an EDR product they paid for.
Visibility means an agent on every Windows, macOS, and Linux device that captures process creation, file modification, registry change, network connection, parent-child relationships, command-line arguments, and module loads. The agent ships that telemetry to a central platform where it lives long enough to query historically. Without complete coverage, the blind spots become the breach surface.
Detection means the platform analyzes the telemetry with both signature-based rules and behavioral models. Signatures catch the known; behavioral models catch the novel. A behavioral model knows that winword.exe spawning powershell.exe with an encoded command line is suspicious regardless of whether the command itself matches a known threat. Detection happens continuously, not at scan time.
Response means the platform can act on a confirmed threat in seconds. The most consequential response action is endpoint isolation: removing the device from the network while preserving the management channel so the analyst can investigate and the attacker cannot pivot. Lateral movement is what turns a single compromised laptop into a ransomware event. Kill the network access in 30 seconds and the blast radius stays small.
Forensics means the telemetry persists long enough to reconstruct what happened after an incident. Process trees, file modification timelines, network connection histories, and command-line logs make the difference between "we know exactly what was touched" and "we are going to assume the worst and notify everyone." For regulated industries with breach-notification obligations, the difference is measured in dollars per affected record.
Signatures Versus Behaviors
The threat landscape changed roughly a decade ago. Detection technology had to follow. Most organizations are still operating on a legacy assumption that fingerprints catch the bad guys. They do not.
Traditional Antivirus
- Signature comparison against a known-bad database. If the file has not been catalogued by the vendor, the file passes.
- Static analysis at write time. Fileless attacks that never touch disk are invisible by design.
- No process telemetry. When an incident does occur, there is nothing to reconstruct the attack from.
- Quarantine and delete only. Cannot isolate the device, cannot kill a running process tree, cannot rotate credentials.
- Full-disk scans on a schedule. Performance impact at scan time, no protection between scans.
EDR, Operated Correctly
- Continuous behavioral analytics. Detects zero-day exploits, living-off-the-land techniques, and insider misuse regardless of whether a signature exists.
- Full process telemetry retained for 30 to 90 days. Investigators reconstruct attack timelines instead of guessing.
- Network isolation in under 60 seconds. The endpoint stays manageable, the attacker loses lateral access.
- Built-in next-generation antivirus. One agent replaces both legacy AV and behavioral monitoring.
- Lightweight agent footprint. Typically under 2 percent CPU and under 200 MB resident memory.
The honest caveat: a tuned signature-based product catches the largest volume of opportunistic commodity malware that bounces around the public internet. It is not useless; it is incomplete. The threats that matter most, the ones that turn into breaches, the ones that hit the news, almost always evade signatures by design. Modern attackers do not deploy yesterday's malware. They use the operating system itself, your trusted tools, and your own administrator credentials to accomplish their objectives. EDR sees that activity. Antivirus does not.
Honest Comparison of Adjacent Categories
The acronyms blur intentionally because vendors compete on category language. Here is the plain-English version. If you read one paragraph from this section, read the table.
| Category | What It Covers | When You Want It |
|---|---|---|
| EDREndpoint Detection and Response | Workstation, laptop, server telemetry. Process behavior, file access, registry changes, network connections, command-line arguments on the host itself. Single-source-of-truth for endpoint activity. | You need the endpoint blind spot closed. You have other layers covered elsewhere, or you want to start with the highest-leverage detection surface before expanding to network and cloud. Most programs begin here. |
| XDRExtended Detection and Response | EDR plus network telemetry, cloud-workload posture, identity-provider events, email-security signals, and SaaS audit logs correlated in one pipeline. Cross-domain incident reconstruction. | You want a single incident card that ties together the suspicious PowerShell process, the beaconing DNS query, and the Microsoft 365 sign-in from a new IP. See the Managed XDR overview or the Managed XDR Suite anatomy. |
| MDRManaged Detection and Response | A staffing model, not a technology category. MDR providers run a SOC against whatever detection stack the customer or provider chose. Some MDR runs on EDR only; some runs on a full XDR pipeline. | You need the analysts more than you need the tooling. MDR is what Petronella Technology Group provides on top of EDR or XDR. See the MDR service page for the staffing model details. |
| NGAVNext-Generation Antivirus | Behavioral analytics applied to file execution decisions. Sits inside most modern EDR agents as a built-in capability. Standalone NGAV is increasingly rare. | You have constraints that block a full EDR rollout (regulatory, contractual, performance) and need at least behavioral file analysis on every endpoint. Most engagements start with EDR and get NGAV bundled in. |
| SOARSecurity Orchestration, Automation, Response | The playbook engine that executes response actions automatically when conditions match. Lives above EDR or XDR, not beside it. Most response actions in a managed program come from SOAR. | You want known-pattern responses to happen in seconds without waiting for an analyst. SOAR is part of our managed stack by default; it is not sold separately on this page. |
If you only need to close the endpoint visibility gap, EDR is the right starting point. If you need cross-domain correlation across network, cloud, identity, and email, EDR alone will not get you there and the XDR pages are the better read. Most of our engagements start with EDR for the first quarter and expand into XDR once the customer sees the value of behavioral detection and wants to bring more telemetry into the same SOC.
The EDR Engines We Deploy
Vendor-neutral by design. We select the engine that fits your tech stack, existing licenses, compliance scope, and operational preferences. The three options below cover roughly 95 percent of the engagements we run.
SentinelOne Singularity
The default deployment for mixed-OS environments. Strong cross-platform coverage on Windows, macOS, and major Linux distributions. Built-in ransomware rollback, USB device control, and a deterministic detection model that produces low false-positive volume on tuned environments.
- Behavioral AI engine on-agent, decisions without cloud round-trip
- One-click rollback for ransomware encryption
- Native MITRE ATT and CK technique mapping in the console
- Strong CMMC and HIPAA audit-evidence pack
CrowdStrike Falcon
The choice when your organization, your insurance carrier, or your prime contractor effectively requires it. Industry-leading threat intelligence, mature managed-hunt offering, and a deep integration ecosystem. Heavier per-endpoint price but strong incident-investigator pedigree.
- Overwatch managed-hunt service available as an optional layer
- Falcon Insight retains 7 to 90 days of raw telemetry for investigation
- Identity-protection module available for hybrid Active Directory environments
- Common requirement for defense-contractor primes and DIB-CSP scopes
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
The right answer when your environment is heavily Microsoft 365 E5 licensed and the Defender integration into Entra ID, Sentinel SIEM, and Purview compliance reaches further than competitor offerings. Strong on Windows estates; less mature on macOS and Linux relative to the other two.
- Bundled with Microsoft 365 E5 and E5 Security licensing
- Tight integration with Microsoft Sentinel SIEM and Defender XDR
- Strong attack-surface reduction rules for Office and Windows workloads
- Recommended for organizations already committed to the Microsoft security stack
What if you already have one of these? We frequently integrate an existing EDR deployment into our SOC rather than rip and replace. If the license is current, the agent is healthy on your endpoints, and the platform is one we can operate against, we take over the analyst, triage, and tuning layer without churning your endpoint inventory. The conversation in the scoping call determines whether existing tooling stays or moves. We do not earn a referral fee on EDR licenses, so there is no commercial pressure either way.
How a Threat Becomes a Contained Incident
From the first suspicious process event to the customer notification, end to end. Most steps complete in seconds. The analyst handoff is where speed yields to judgment.
+-------------------+ +-------------------+ +-------------------+ +-------------------+ +-------------------+
| ENDPOINT | | AGENT-LOCAL | | CLOUD PLATFORM | | SOAR + ANALYST | | CUSTOMER |
| - Win 10/11 | | - behavioral ML | | - correlation | | - playbook fires | | - named POC |
| - Win Server | ---> | - signature scan | ---> | - threat-intel | ---> | - tier-1 analyst | ---> | - ticket sent |
| - macOS | | - process tree | | - global rules | | - tier-2 hunter | | - briefing call |
| - Linux | | - parent + cmd | | - long retention | | - tier-3 forens. | | - report next AM|
| - VDI / VM | | | | | | | | |
+-------------------+ +-------------------+ +-------------------+ +-------------------+ +-------------------+
| ^ |
| | |
+------------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------+
FEEDBACK LOOP: false-positive suppression, baseline refinement, hunt iteration
The flow above is what every Petronella EDR engagement runs against. The variability is in the threshold tuning, which is where the experience of the SOC matters more than the engine. A junior team running a strong product will produce alert fatigue; a senior team running the same product will produce useful detections. The platform is necessary but not sufficient; the operating discipline is what produces outcomes.
What EDR Actually Catches
Not a marketing list. Six attack categories we see in customer environments every quarter, and the EDR behaviors that catch them.
Ransomware Encryption MITRE T1486
The detection that justifies most EDR purchases. Encryption activity has an unmistakable behavioral fingerprint: a single process opens hundreds of files, modifies them, and writes a new extension within a short time window. EDR flags the pattern within seconds, kills the process, isolates the host, and (on platforms with rollback) restores the affected files from shadow copy.
Real-world outcomes depend on alert hygiene. A tuned environment catches and contains ransomware within 60 to 90 seconds of the first encrypted file. An untuned environment alerts on every legitimate backup job and the analyst pod develops alert fatigue. Tuning is where we earn our keep.
Fileless and Living-off-the-Land MITRE T1059
The attack class signatures cannot see. powershell.exe, wmic.exe, certutil.exe, mshta.exe, and similar built-in Windows utilities used as attacker infrastructure. The binaries themselves are legitimate, signed by Microsoft, and present on every Windows endpoint by default. The attack happens in the command-line arguments, the parent-child relationship, and the network destination.
EDR catches it because EDR sees the full picture: who launched the binary, what arguments were passed, what the binary did, where it connected. A behavioral rule that flags winword.exe spawning powershell.exe with a base-64 encoded command line catches an entire class of phishing payloads without ever caring about the specific payload contents.
Credential Theft and Lateral Movement MITRE T1003 / T1021
The middle phase of every targeted breach. After initial access, attackers harvest credentials from memory (Mimikatz, LSASS dumping), pivot to other hosts (PsExec, WMI, SMB), and escalate privileges (Kerberoasting, AS-REP roasting). EDR detects each step: LSASS access patterns, unusual remote-execution invocations, and abnormal Kerberos ticket activity all produce behavioral signatures.
The hardest part is keeping the analyst pod from drowning in admin-tool noise. PsExec is also a legitimate sysadmin tool. The behavioral rule that fires on PsExec must consider source, destination, time of day, account context, and recent process history. Tuning lives here.
Supply-Chain and Trusted-Source Attacks MITRE T1195
The SolarWinds and Kaseya class of incident. A trusted application, signed by a trusted vendor, ships malicious code through a legitimate update channel. The binary executes with full corporate trust because the signature is valid. Signature-based detection is structurally blind to this category.
EDR catches supply-chain attacks because the post-execution behavior is suspicious regardless of how the binary got there. A trusted monitoring agent that begins making outbound TLS connections to a new domain, executing shell commands, or modifying registry persistence keys produces the same behavioral signal as an obviously malicious binary doing the same thing. The trust attribution does not silence the behavioral alert.
Insider Threat and Account Misuse MITRE T1078
The category that traditional security tooling actively suppresses. An authorized user with valid credentials accessing data they have permission to access does not look like an attack to a perimeter tool, an identity-provider log, or an antivirus engine. It looks like a Tuesday.
EDR detects it through behavioral baselining: an engineer who normally accesses a dozen files per day in a specific project directory and suddenly downloads three thousand files across multiple project directories has produced a behavioral anomaly worth investigating. The same logic applies to compromised legitimate accounts, where the attacker is operating with valid credentials but exhibits behavior the real user never would.
Zero-Day Exploitation MITRE T1190
The vulnerability for which there is no patch yet. By definition, signature-based detection cannot have a signature for it. The behavioral angle is what makes EDR effective: a vulnerable application crashing repeatedly, an unexpected child process spawning from a browser, a suddenly elevated privilege context, or anomalous shellcode-style memory regions all signal exploitation regardless of which vulnerability is being abused.
Zero-day defense is less about catching the specific exploit and more about catching the post-exploitation behavior. Once the attacker is inside the process, the actions they take to maintain persistence and escalate privileges look the same as they always do. EDR sees those actions. The patch coverage gap becomes an investigation window, not an open door.
The Analyst Layer Behind the Agent
An EDR product without an analyst pod is a dashboard that screams in an empty room. The Petronella SOC is the layer that turns telemetry into outcomes.
The Petronella 24/7 hybrid SOC is staffed by senior analysts on every shift, backed by tier-2 threat hunters and tier-3 forensic specialists during business hours. The artificial intelligence layer prioritizes the alert queue against learned customer baselines; humans make every containment call that affects customer operations. We do not delegate consequential decisions to a model.
What that looks like in practice: when your EDR fires a high-confidence ransomware detection at 3:14 AM, the playbook isolates the host within 60 seconds and the on-call analyst is in the incident within five minutes. The analyst confirms the detection, expands the investigation to look for lateral indicators, contacts your named primary point of contact, and begins forensic timeline reconstruction. By 7 AM you have a written briefing and a recommended next-step path. By 9 AM you have a decision on whether the incident escalates to a full incident response engagement or stays in steady-state SOC handling.
Most managed EDR programs in the market hand off after-hours coverage to an offshore analyst pod with a script and no authority to make decisions. We staff the night shift with senior analysts based in the United States who have the authority to act. The cost differential is real. The outcomes differential is bigger.
For the full SOC operating model, including the AI plus human hybrid architecture, see the SOC as a Service overview. For the broader managed-detection-and-response engagement type, see the MDR service page. The EDR engagement on this page is the endpoint-only scope; SOC capability comes bundled with it.
The First Sixty Days
Realistic milestones, not marketing claims. The agent goes everywhere in week one. The detection edge sharpens through weeks four and eight as baselines settle and false positives get tuned out.
Kickoff and Pilot Deployment
- SOC introduction call with named senior analyst as your relationship owner
- Asset discovery scan validates scope and licensed endpoint count
- EDR agent pushed to a 5 percent pilot cohort across all OS families
- Communication channels established: Slack or Teams, ticketing, after-hours escalation
- Initial policy template applied: cross-platform behavioral baseline
Full Endpoint Rollout
- EDR agent deployment completes across all endpoints in scope
- Group Policy, Intune, SCCM, or Jamf push profiles validated per OS
- Server and VDI templates updated to include agent on provisioning
- Baseline event volume measured for capacity sizing
- First daily detection-tuning review with the analyst pod
Tuning and First Hunt Cycle
- False-positive suppression rules tuned against your specific environment
- First proactive threat hunt across captured behavioral corpus
- Behavioral baseline pass completes on user and service-account patterns
- Initial compliance evidence pack generated against declared framework
- Quarterly business review template populated with first 30 days of metrics
Steady-State Operations
- SOAR containment playbooks customized to your runbook conventions
- Detection coverage validated through purple-team tabletop exercise
- Compliance evidence pack ready for auditor or assessor review
- Alert noise reduced 60 to 80 percent from week-1 baseline
- First business review delivered with measured improvement metrics
The deployment timeline is achievable. The detection-edge timeline is honest. Anyone who promises "fully operational on day one" is selling you the demo console, not the production outcome. EDR earns its detection value as the agent learns your environment and the analyst pod learns the false-positive shape of your operations. Most engagements hit useful detection by week four and full steady-state by week eight.
Which EDR Capability Answers Which Control
EDR is the technical control layer behind a long list of regulatory requirements. Petronella Technology Group consults across all CMMC levels, including Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3. We are CMMC-RP certified and operate as a Registered Provider Organization, RPO #1449.
| Framework / Control Family | Requirement Summary | EDR Capability That Answers It |
|---|---|---|
| CMMC Level 1, Level 2, Level 3System and Information Integrity (SI.L2-3.14.2, SI.L2-3.14.6, SI.L2-3.14.7) | Provide protection from malicious code; monitor security alerts and advisories; identify unauthorized use of organizational systems. | Behavioral detection, automated containment, command-line and process-tree telemetry. Evidence pack maps to each SI control. |
| CMMC Level 1, Level 2, Level 3Audit and Accountability (AU) | Create and retain audit logs sufficient for monitoring, investigation, and reporting of unlawful or unauthorized activity. | EDR telemetry retention 30 to 90 days hot, extended for CMMC scope. Tamper-evident option for assessor confidence. |
| HIPAA Security Rule164.308 and 164.312 | Audit controls, integrity, person or entity authentication, and security incident procedures including detection and response. | Per-endpoint audit telemetry, behavioral anomaly detection on PHI-handling devices, documented incident-response chain. |
| PCI-DSS v4.0.1Requirements 10 and 11 | Log and monitor all access to system components and cardholder data; deploy intrusion-detection technology with prompt response. | Endpoint behavioral monitoring on cardholder-environment systems, automated SOAR response on intrusion patterns. |
| NIST 800-171 Rev 23.14 System and Information Integrity | Identify, report, and correct system flaws; provide protection from malicious code; perform periodic and real-time scans. | Continuous behavioral analytics on every endpoint, near-real-time threat detection, scheduled hunt cadence. |
| NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0Detect and Respond functions | Anomaly and event detection, continuous security monitoring, response planning and execution. | EDR is the Detect-function technical control for endpoints; SOAR playbooks plus analyst pod cover the Respond function. |
| SOC 2Trust Service Criteria CC7.1 to CC7.4 | Detect, respond to, and resolve security events; communicate to internal and external stakeholders. | EDR alerting feeds the documented incident-detection pipeline; SOC analyst escalation satisfies the response component. |
| FTC Safeguards Rule16 CFR 314.4 | Implement safeguards including monitoring and detection of intrusions; periodic review and updating. | Continuous endpoint monitoring, annual safeguards-assessment evidence package, quarterly tuning review. |
EDR alone is not a compliance certification. It is one technical control layer in a larger compliance program that includes policies, procedures, a System Security Plan, evidence of operating effectiveness, and (for higher CMMC levels) third-party assessment. We deliver both halves: the technical control via this EDR engagement, and the documentation and assessment-readiness work through our CMMC compliance practice.
What an EDR Engagement Costs
Custom-quoted per engagement. Petronella Technology Group does not publish a sticker price because the per-engagement variance is real. From a 30-minute scoping call we produce a fixed monthly subscription with no surprise overage line items.
The variables that drive the quote: endpoint count, operating-system mix, compliance scope, retention requirements, response-time service-level expectations, and whether you already license an EDR product we can integrate against. A typical engagement for a 50- to 100-endpoint professional-services or defense-contractor organization lands as a low-four-figure to low-five-figure monthly subscription depending on those variables. From the scoping call the quote arrives within five business days as a one-page proposal.
The engagement includes the platform license (when we provide it), all SOC analyst time across all shifts, tuning and threat-hunt cycles, the SOAR playbook library, compliance evidence packaging, quarterly business reviews, and after-hours incident response up to the steady-state response capacity. Forensic-grade investigation for major incidents transitions to our Incident Response Services team and is quoted separately when invoked. Initial deployment and onboarding labor is included; no separate professional-services line item for the first 60 days.
Contract terms are standard one-year with month-to-month thereafter on a 60-day notice provision. There is no auto-renewal lock-in beyond the initial term. We do not hold customer data hostage; on exit we provide the full telemetry retention period in raw format plus the SOAR playbook source so an incoming team can pick up the operation without losing visibility.
Questions Buyers Ask Before They Sign
If your question is about cross-domain correlation across network, cloud, identity, and email, the Managed XDR service overview or the XDR Suite bundle anatomy are the better reads. The FAQ below is scoped to endpoint-specific questions.
How is EDR different from antivirus?
Antivirus compares a file against a known-bad signature database before allowing execution. If the file has not been catalogued, it passes. EDR captures the behavior of the running process: command-line arguments, parent-child relationships, file modifications, network connections, registry changes, and module loads. It catches threats that signatures cannot see because the behavior is suspicious regardless of whether the binary itself is known.
Most modern EDR platforms include next-generation antivirus as a built-in capability, so you typically do not need a separate antivirus product. One agent, both detection styles, one console for the analyst to operate.
Will EDR slow down our endpoints?
Modern EDR agents are lightweight. The platforms we deploy typically consume under 2 percent of CPU and under 200 MB of resident memory on a tuned policy. End users do not notice the agent. The performance impact is meaningfully lower than legacy antivirus products that run scheduled full-disk scans, because EDR does its analysis continuously in small increments rather than in large scheduled bursts.
The exception is the first three days after agent deployment, where the platform builds its initial behavioral baseline and event volume is higher than steady state. We monitor this period closely for performance complaints and adjust the policy if needed.
What happens when EDR detects a real threat?
For pre-authorized high-confidence detections (ransomware encryption pattern, known command-and-control beaconing, credential dumping behavior), the SOAR playbook isolates the host from the network within 60 seconds while preserving the management channel. The on-call analyst is paged immediately. Within five minutes the analyst is in the incident, validating the detection, expanding the investigation, and preparing the customer notification.
For medium-confidence detections, the playbook does not auto-contain. Instead the alert routes to the analyst queue for human triage. The analyst either escalates to containment or suppresses the false positive and updates the tuning rule. Either way, you get a notification appropriate to the actual severity, not an inbox full of low-signal noise.
Can EDR protect remote workers and traveling employees?
Yes. EDR agents protect endpoints regardless of network location. Whether the device is on your corporate network, on a home network, on a public Wi-Fi at a coffee shop, or roaming internationally, the agent continues monitoring, detecting, and reporting. Cloud-based management means we have full visibility into every endpoint without requiring a VPN connection back to your corporate network.
Containment actions work the same way. If an endpoint in a hotel in Singapore is detected encrypting files, the platform isolates it from the local network within 60 seconds. The remote worker is locked out of network resources while still able to receive a phone call explaining what just happened.
Do you require us to standardize on one EDR vendor?
No. We are vendor-neutral by design. The three engines we routinely deploy cover roughly 95 percent of engagements, and we maintain operational competency on others. If you already license an EDR product we can integrate against, we usually take over the analyst layer without churning your endpoint inventory. The scoping call is where we decide whether existing tooling stays or moves. We do not earn referral fees on EDR licenses, so there is no commercial pressure toward any specific platform.
The one place we will push back is when the existing platform is on a discontinuation path, the license is being retired by the vendor, or we have benchmarked it as substantively underperforming for the customer's use case. We will tell you in the scoping call rather than after the contract.
Can the EDR engagement satisfy CMMC Level 3?
Yes. Petronella Technology Group consults across all CMMC levels, including Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3. The EDR technical-control coverage is identical across levels; what changes at higher levels is the documentation rigor, the System Security Plan depth, the evidence-collection cadence, and the involvement of a C3PAO assessor. We are CMMC-RP certified and operate as a CMMC-AB Registered Provider Organization, RPO #1449.
For Level 3 engagements, the EDR layer pairs with our broader CMMC compliance practice, which covers the policy, procedure, SSP, POA and M, and assessor-coordination work. Most defense-contractor engagements end up combining both halves.
How does EDR handle macOS and Linux servers?
The platforms we deploy ship native agents for Windows 10 and 11, Windows Server (2016 through 2022 and beyond), macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), and major Linux distributions (RHEL, CentOS, Rocky, Ubuntu, Debian, Amazon Linux, SUSE). Cross-platform coverage matters because attackers do not respect the assumption that "we only need to monitor Windows."
Detection depth varies by platform. Windows has the deepest behavioral telemetry across all three engines. macOS coverage is excellent on SentinelOne and CrowdStrike, more limited on Microsoft Defender. Linux coverage is strongest on SentinelOne and CrowdStrike. We match the engine to the OS mix in the scoping call.
What happens to the data we have on the platform if we leave?
On contract exit you receive the full telemetry retention period in raw format, the SOAR playbook source, the tuning rule library, and a transition runbook for your incoming team. Contracts are one-year terms with month-to-month thereafter on a 60-day notice provision. There are no auto-renewal lock-ins beyond the initial term.
We operate on the premise that good service retains customers, not contract gotchas. Most customers stay because the relationship works; the ones that leave do so cleanly. We have no incentive to make exit difficult because referrals from former customers matter to us.
How does EDR work alongside the rest of our security stack?
EDR is the endpoint visibility layer. It pairs naturally with network detection and response (NDR) for east-west traffic visibility, with cloud security posture management for misconfigured cloud workloads, with identity protection for account-takeover detection, and with email security for the most common initial-access vector. Many of our engagements start with EDR and grow into a full XDR program as the customer sees the value of cross-domain correlation.
The integrations are mature. EDR telemetry flows into our correlation pipeline alongside the other detection sources. When a suspicious PowerShell process on an endpoint, a beaconing DNS query on the network sensor, and a Microsoft 365 sign-in from a brand-new IP all converge on the same incident, the analyst sees one card with three sources of context rather than three siloed alerts.
What if we suspect we already have an active threat in our environment?
Do not start with the standard EDR onboarding. Call (919) 348-4912 immediately. We will dispatch our incident response team first to contain and investigate the active threat, then transition you into steady-state EDR once the incident is resolved. The two engagements run in sequence rather than in parallel during a crisis, because spinning up a new agent rollout while simultaneously fighting an active intrusion produces operational chaos and gives the attacker cover.
If you are unsure whether what you are seeing is a real incident or a false alarm, that is also a 919-348-4912 call. The five-minute triage conversation is free; we would rather absorb the call than miss the real one.
Where EDR Fits in the Broader Program
The EDR engagement is the endpoint-focused layer. These adjacent Petronella services compose with it for engagement-specific scope.
Managed XDR Service Overview
The cross-domain version: endpoint plus network plus cloud plus identity plus email correlation
Managed XDR Suite Anatomy
The full bundled stack with wiring diagram, component-by-component documentation, and pricing variables
Cybersecurity Pillar
The broader cybersecurity program: governance, awareness training, risk management, framework alignment
Cloud Security Posture Management
Configuration baselining, drift detection, and over-privileged IAM detection for AWS, Azure, and GCP
Managed Detection and Response
The MDR staffing model: 24/7 SOC analysts running against whatever detection stack fits your scope
Incident Response Services
When steady-state response capacity is exceeded, the IR team takes over with forensic-grade investigation
Managed IT Services
If you also need day-to-day endpoint operations, patching, and helpdesk to layer with EDR detection
CMMC Compliance Practice
The documentation and assessment half of the engagement for defense-contractor scopes
See the Detection Stack Before You Decide
A 30-minute scoping call produces a real quote, a real onboarding schedule, and a real conversation with a senior analyst (not a sales engineer). Petronella Technology Group has been operating security programs from 5540 Centerview Dr., Suite 200, Raleigh, NC 27606 since 2002.