AHEAD Managed Detection and Response Services

Ahead maintains strong technical aptitude for solution design and delivery of solution technologies and transition, delivery, and engineering personnel. They establish expected boundaries for a MSSP solution so as not to tailor their solution to the intricacies inherent to a given customer, but also make reasonable allowances for custom needs, within reason. Ahead uses third party vendor packages for some solution components use sound technology vendors that they incorporate into their service, but rely more on their engineering and thought leadership in the establishment of how they fold them into their services, vs. aligning with more expensive best of breed solutions, presumably keeping costs more reasonable.

They provided great looking dashboards for our different services.

The response time when any alerts are generated through the the detection tool. The vendor also communicates directly with us if an issue arises in detection of potential threats. We also value the vendor puts on human interaction with the customers and not just relying on tools and reports. Adding the detection service has given us an assurance that even if a cyber attack occurs we have added many necessary tools that can assist us in recovery after the attack. The vendor has gathered data and experience on our network to assist us in making crucial decisions needed to suppress or survive and cyber attack.

The main detraction at the moment coincides with and should be considered the other side of the coin of one of Ahead's strengths, which is use of a third party software platforms. While the platform is sound, and we are favoring Ahead's thought leadership and engineering in developing and managing the platform, there have some been limitations with other 3rd party integrations and the ability to parse data, as compared with equivalent, incumbent technologies we previously used but have elected to outsource to Ahead. With this in mind, these are not calling into question our decision to align with Ahead and they have been very responsive in addressing or finding workarounds.

The dashboards are lacking in depth, but they do look good at the surface level.

We also subscribe to the vendors Managed Services and sometimes there seems to be a disjoin between the two groups (SOC and Managed Services) when working on solutions for our company where both departments are involved to complete a project . During projects if this issue arises it is worked out but the process may take a while to get all resources from both departments on the same page. The vendor is constantly working on methods to make this integration process more seamless to us the customer and we are seeing progress in this developing synergy between the two departments. This should be a continued effort from leadership of the vendor.