Managed XDR Services 24/7 SOC, MTTR Under 15 Minutes

Managed Extended Detection and Response, sometimes called MXDR, is a single security service that pulls together five different telemetry domains and runs them through one correlation engine, watched by one 24/7 SOC, under one contract. Endpoint EDR tells you what is happening on the laptop. Network NDR tells you what is happening between the laptop and everything else. Identity IDR tells you what is happening to the credential that authenticated. Cloud workload detection tells you whether the same identity then touched the AWS or Azure environment. Email security tells you whether the original lure that started this chain came through your inbox. Stitched together they describe an attack. Pulled apart, each tool answers a different question and the attacker walks between the gaps.

Petronella Technology Group has been running this work in North Carolina since 2002. The firm holds CMMC-AB Registered Provider Organization status, number 1449. Every engineer is CMMC-RP credentialed. Founder Craig Petronella holds CMMC-RP, CCNA, CWNE (Certified Wireless Network Expert), and a state-issued Digital Forensics Examiner credential, license number 604180. The firm maintains a BBB A+ rating continuously since 2003. None of those acronyms run a SOC by themselves, but they tell you who is going to be holding the response keys to your environment when the alert fires at 02:17 on a Saturday.

The cost case for MXDR over a build-it-yourself SOC is rarely close. Industry salary surveys put a credentialed SOC analyst at roughly $95,000 to $140,000 per year fully loaded. Twenty four by seven by three sixty five coverage requires six analysts at minimum to cover shifts, holidays, vacation, and sick days. Add a detection engineer, a SOC lead, and the licensing for the SIEM and the EDR and the cloud detection platform and the threat intelligence feeds, and the internal-build bill clears one and a half to two million dollars annually before the first alert fires. Petronella's managed model delivers the same capability at a fraction of the cost because the SOC, the platform, and the detection engineering are amortized across many clients. The bill of materials becomes a known monthly line item rather than a hiring and retention problem.

Equally important, an internal-build SOC ages quickly. The threat landscape moves faster than the typical security hiring cycle. The attacker tradecraft that mattered in 2022 looks different from the attacker tradecraft that matters today. Petronella's detection engineering team updates correlation rules, MITRE ATT&CK mappings, and threat intelligence indicators continuously, with every client benefiting from every detection improvement. That is the operational advantage that a single-client internal SOC simply cannot match without unsustainable headcount.

Defense contractors and the Defense Industrial Base. CMMC 2.0 Level 2 and Level 3 require continuous monitoring and incident response evidence that a passive review will not produce. MXDR pre-maps every alert to the practice catalog, every monthly report to the SSP, and every quarterly tabletop to IR.L2-3.6.3. The defense supply chain attack surface is the highest-stakes work we do and the deliverable formats reflect that. See our engineering firms cybersecurity hub for the vertical narrative on the DIB-adjacent engineering practice.

Healthcare and HIPAA-regulated entities. Hospitals, clinics, dental practices, and Business Associates carry HIPAA Security Rule obligations under 45 CFR Part 164. The threat profile centers on ransomware against EHR systems, business email compromise targeting accounts-payable workflows, and credential abuse against remote-access portals. MXDR's 24/7 SOC and the IR retainer line item are usually the difference between a contained incident and a regulator notification. Petronella signs a Business Associate Agreement before any work begins. See HIPAA compliance services for the broader compliance wrap.

Financial services and accounting firms. Wealth managers, CPAs, registered investment advisors, and small banks operate under FFIEC, SEC, FINRA, and state-level supervisory expectations. Wire-fraud and business email compromise are the leading threat patterns, frequently joined with credential theft from cloud-hosted productivity suites. MXDR's email security and identity IDR domains correlate directly to those threat patterns. Cyber insurance underwriting for financial services has tightened materially since 2022 and MXDR evidence is one of the cleanest paths to a renewable policy.

Manufacturing, engineering, and architecture firms. Manufacturers and engineering firms hold the trade secrets, the CAD files, and the proprietary process documentation that nation-state and financially motivated actors specifically target. The OT and ICS adjacency adds a second attack surface that conventional IT detection rarely covers. MXDR with OT scoping closes the gap. Engineering firms with DoD or DIB contract exposure pull in the CMMC overlay as well.

Professional services and legal firms. Law firms hold privileged client data, financial wire authority, and frequent merger-acquisition-litigation intelligence. The attack pattern often centers on credential theft followed by business email compromise targeting partner-level wire approvals. MXDR's identity IDR and email security domains together catch the chain at the credential-abuse step before the wire goes out.

Days one through five: scoping call, signed engagement letter, executed Master Services Agreement, executed Business Associate Agreement where HIPAA applies. Asset inventory exchange: endpoints, identities, cloud tenants, email tenants, and the specific tooling stack already in place. The objective is to remove ambiguity from the bill of materials before any agent is deployed.

Days six through twelve: telemetry connectors deployed and validated. EDR integration with whichever endpoint platform is in place. Identity provider connector to Active Directory, Entra ID, or Okta. Cloud tenant audit feeds connected to the correlation engine. Email tenant API connections to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Each connector is validated end-to-end before the next one is wired in, so a misconfigured tenant does not silently produce zero telemetry for three weeks.

Days thirteen through twenty: baseline tuning. The correlation engine watches the environment for two weeks to establish behavioral baselines. Login patterns, authentication geographies, service-account activity windows, normal east-west flow volumes, expected outbound DNS cadence. Tuning runs in shadow mode so genuine alerts are still surfaced while false-positive thresholds adjust to your environment.

Days twenty-one through twenty-seven: live-cutover. Automated playbooks activate. The SOC begins active alerting against the tuned baseline. The named SOC point-of-contact and the escalation tree are confirmed in writing. The first weekly status review covers the tuning results, the open detection coverage gaps, and the IR retainer hour balance.

Days twenty-eight through thirty: first monthly executive summary lands. Tabletop scheduling kicks off for the upcoming quarter. Compliance evidence mapping is reviewed with the client's compliance lead or vCISO. The engagement is now in steady state and the relationship moves from onboarding cadence to operational cadence.

Most clients onboard in under thirty days. Larger environments with multi-tenant cloud footprints and OT scoping can run forty-five to sixty days. The engagement letter names the target. The weekly status review tracks variance against it.