PLANO, Texas, May 12, 2022 — The collaboration has allowed Critical Start to leverage its expert use of Microsoft 365 Defender to improve existing and develop new offerings for the security community — Today, Critical Start, a leading provider of Managed Detection and Response (MDR) cybersecurity solutions, announced that the company participated in a “design collaboration” with Microsoft to share input and feedback in the development of its new Microsoft Security Experts services. The new offerings were developed in response to the shortage of talent, particularly highly skilled talent, that the cybersecurity industry is experiencing.
The first of the new offerings, Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting, allows customers with an already existing security operations center to get help from Microsoft experts in hunting for threats across their Microsoft 365 Defender data. The second new offering, Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR, is a managed detection and response service for Microsoft 365 Defender. The third new offering, Microsoft Security Services for Enterprise, is a comprehensive service geared towards large enterprises. All three services in this suite were announced earlier today.
In the fall of 2021, Critical Start received an invitation to participate in the collaborative effort, with meetings being held twice per month. During these meetings, the leads from Critical Start’s development and product teams came together with engineering teams from Microsoft to work through how to best align Critical Start’s existing offerings and the new Microsoft Security Experts offerings. Microsoft developed solutions from scratch based on Critical Start’s feedback and input, rather than tweaking an existing offering to make “good enough” services.
“This collaboration with Microsoft highlights their commitment to the partner community,” said Randy Watkins, chief technology officer at Critical Start. “The transparency and visibility provided by Microsoft, coupled with the feedback given by Critical Start during the design phase, allowed us to focus on driving value and providing the best outcome for customers.”
“Microsoft worked with Critical Start in the design process because of their expert use of the capabilities inside Microsoft 365 Defender to deliver their managed detection and response service,” said Andrew Conway, Vice President, Security Marketing at Microsoft. “The input and feedback provided was instrumental in the development of a solution that will dramatically improve the security of our mutual customers.”
More details on the collaboration can be found in today’s blog post.
About Critical Start
Today’s enterprise faces radical, ever-growing, and ever-sophisticated multi-vector cyber-attacks. Facing this situation is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. Critical Start simplifies breach prevention by delivering the most effective managed detection and incident response services powered by the Zero Trust Analytics Platform™ (ZTAP) with the industry’s only Trusted Behavior Registry (TBR) and MOBILESOC®. With 24x7x365 expert security analysts, and Cyber Research Unit (CRU), we monitor, investigate, and remediate alerts swiftly and effectively, via contractual Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for Time to Detection (TTD) and Median Time to Resolution (MTTR), and 100% transparency into our service. For more information, visit criticalstart.com.
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