Achieving True Protection with Complete Signal Coverage

Cybersecurity professionals know all too well that visibility into potential threats is no longer a luxury — it’s a necessity. Unfortunately, traditional Managed Detection and Response (MDR) solutions focus primarily on connecting to security sources without ensuring they receive all critical signals from those sources. Critical Start’s Complete Signal Coverage helps identify signal gaps in your environment — whether from endpoint protection gaps, vulnerability scanning coverage gaps, or issues with log sources and ingest health. This distinction is crucial — it’s not just about what sources you’re connected to but whether you’re getting all the critical signals you need. 

In an industry where your MDR is only as effective as the signals it receives, Complete Signal Coverage isn’t just another industry term — it’s our deliberate approach to ensuring the essential signals needed for robust threat detection and response are continuously monitored. Want to learn more? Read on.

What Is Complete Signal Coverage?

Complete Signal Coverage (CSC) focuses on the quality and completeness of security signals from your sources. While security sources — like endpoints, cloud environments, and networks — are where your security data comes from, signals are the specific pieces of information from those sources that indicate if something needs attention. Critical Start delivers full coverage across your technology landscape, elevating MDR standards with:  

• Comprehensive asset visibility and normalized inventory
• 100+ log sources across IT & Operational Technology (OT) systems
• Active SIEM log health checks and coverage gap identification
• Signal validation for identity, email, and cloud threats 

Complete Signal Coverage Monitors Key Security Controls

• Identify Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) protection gaps
• Monitor vulnerability scanner coverage
• Detect overlooked SIEM log sources and potential log health issues

Ensuring all expected security signals are received by the SOC, including:

• Endpoints: Detecting potential malware, unauthorized access, and other endpoint-specific threats.
• SIEM: Analyzing logs and events from various systems for patterns indicative of threats.
• Identity and Access Management: Monitoring identity signals to detect unauthorized access attempts or unusual activity.
• Email: Detecting phishing attempts, malware distribution, and other email-based threats.
• Cloud Environments: Providing visibility into cloud workloads and identifying misconfigurations or unusual behaviors in cloud-based systems.
• OT Systems: Maintaining continuous visibility into operational technology environments, which is essential for industries reliant on industrial control systems.
• Firewalls: Monitoring firewall logs to detect and prevent unauthorized access attempts across network boundaries. 

This curated approach to Complete Signal Coverage enables Critical Start to minimize unmonitored gaps in crucial areas of an organization’s computing environment, delivering a focused and effective approach to threat detection. 

Understanding What Complete Signal Coverage Is Not

Understanding how Complete Signal Coverage relates to other security concepts is important. Through Asset Visibility, we monitor for endpoint protection gaps and track vulnerability scanner coverage. Through SIEM detection gaps and log health monitoring, we help identify overlooked log sources and potential issues with log ingestion and data quality. While many providers focus on connecting to numerous sources, Complete Signal Coverage ensures you understand where potential signal gaps might exist, focusing on signals crucial for threat detection and response. 

Why Complete Signal Coverage Matters 

As cyber threats increase in volume and complexity, it’s not enough to simply connect to security sources — you need to know you’re receiving the expected signals from those sources. MDR solutions that focus only on source connections might miss critical signals that could indicate a threat. Critical Start’s Complete Signal Coverage helps identify potential gaps in your security signals, whether from endpoint protection gaps, incomplete vulnerability scanning coverage, or SIEM log source and health issues. This approach helps strengthen your security monitoring capabilities, by overcoming challenges, including:

• Visibility: Unidentified assets and shadow IT 
• Signal collection: Security coverage gaps and integration complexity 
• Signal quality: Validation gaps, failed signal collection, and missing correlations 

How Complete Signal Coverage Addresses Security Needs

Security leaders initially focus on having coverage across all their security sources — endpoints, identity, email, cloud, OT systems, networks, and applications. However, integration with your security tools is just the first step. The crucial next step is ensuring you receive all the signals you expect from these sources.

Once you are confident you are receiving all expected threat signals, additional features within Complete Signal Coverage empower you to:

• Create a Unified Asset Inventory: Consolidate asset data into a single view to eliminate blind spots across your organization.
• Utilize Asset Criticality Ratings: Prioritize assets by business impact to ensure critical systems receive top-level monitoring and fast response.

This is where Complete Signal Coverage makes a difference — by helping you understand where signal gaps might exist (and what next steps to take), you can be more confident in your threat detection and response capabilities.

Key Takeaways and Next Steps: The Critical Start Difference with Complete Signal Coverage 

With Complete Signal Coverage, Critical Start offers security leaders a focused approach that emphasizes critical signals and reduces unmonitored areas. By concentrating on high-impact security sources and proactively identifying critical signals across IT, cloud, and OT environments, our MDR delivers real-time threat visibility where it matters most. This signal-focused approach helps strengthen your security posture by ensuring that only high-priority alerts reach your security team for efficient and effective threat detection and response.

Ready to boost your security posture? Let’s talk.