Data & research · 2 MIN READ · SCOUT SCHOLES · MAY 6, 2025 · TAGS: Resource
TL;DR
- The Enterprise Strategy Group has published a new economic validation report: Analyzing the Economic Benefits of Expel’s Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Services
- The report dives into the financial details on building or buying your MDR solution
- Spoiler alert: their research found that Expel can help increase your operational efficiency with an annual ROI of 308%
When it comes to any kind of addition to your tech stack, there’s always a question lingering—to build or to buy? And the same question applies to building out a security operations center (SOC). Do you challenge yourself to find and build it in-house, or look for a managed detection and response (MDR) service provider to partner with?
The latest report from the Enterprise Strategy Group covers just that. Their latest economic validation report, Analyzing the Economic Benefits of Expel’s Managed Detection and Response Services, outlines the real challenges impacting that decision.
Security leaders must ask themselves a litany of questions: How long will it take to find and recruit the talent I need? How can I retain them? How will I scale that team? Will they need additional expertise to manage our tech stack? Is our tech stack efficient as-is, or will it create an alert overload and lead to burnout? What’s the cost of doing all of this 24×7 and scaling as we grow?
And that’s just scratching the surface on the complexities of building and maintaining an in-house SOC. Enterprise Strategy Group’s in-depth analysis revealed the benefits of foregoing that option and instead choosing to partner with Expel, including:
- Skipping the arduous build phase and deploy comprehensive protection immediately, accelerating protection by 24+ months
- Redirecting your IT budget toward strategic initiatives rather than infrastructure, and slash implementation costs by 80%
- Achieving enterprise-grade security without enterprise-grade investments and get a 99% risk reduction
- Saving your team from alert fatigue by freeing up their time to focus on what matters by eliminating 90% of alert noise
- Realizing 308% ROI in just one year via independently-verified return that continues to grow over time
- Access to Expel’s wealth of cybersecurity knowledge gathered from years of supporting customers across industries, locations, and security maturity levels
The gist of it? Choosing to buy (with Expel, at least) and investing in an MDR partner instead of building your own SOC is a good fiscal choice to protect your business sooner, reduce overall risk, and increase your operational efficiency.
According to Enterprise Strategy Group research, “45% of organizations reported that security operations are more difficult now than just two years ago. This comes as no surprise, as the number and type of threats are evolving daily and becoming more sophisticated and the attack surface is expanding as organizations adopt cloud infrastructure, support remote workers and remote/branch offices, and implement SaaS applications. With an increase in both attack surface and types of threats, SOC teams have become overwhelmed with the volume of alerts and data collected to assess risk. This might force teams into a reactive mode instead of a proactive mode with a fear-based decision-making approach instead of a risk-based approach.”
You can download and explore the full report here.
Disclaimer: ”While Enterprise Strategy Group’s models are built in good faith upon conservative, credible, and validated assumptions, no single modeled scenario will ever represent every potential environment. The costs and benefits received from using Expel Managed Detection and Response services will depend on the details of an organization’s requirements and practices. Enterprise Strategy Group recommends that organizations perform their own analysis of available products and consult with their Expel representative to understand and discuss the differences between the solutions through their own proof-of-concept testing.”
