MDR · 3 MIN READ · SCOUT SCHOLES · OCT 10, 2025 · TAGS: Resource
TL;DR
- Expel was recognized–for the seventh time–in the 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services
- This report helps buyers navigate the saturated MDR market to find the solution for their needs
- You can read the full report here
The 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for Managed Detection & Response Services is back. Last year, we believed the report focused on the volume of vendors in the MDR space, and how orgs can decide which of the many options is right for them. This year, in our opinion, the focus has shifted to the specifics of what defines the quality of an MDR provider.
According to Gartner, “MDR services provide customers with remote delivered, human-led, turnkey, modern SOC functions, ultimately delivering cyberattack disruption and containment. Cybersecurity leaders should use this research to identify MDR services that meet their business-driven risk requirements.”1
What you’ll find in the report
Expel is proud to be positioned as a Representative Vendor by Gartner for the seventh consecutive time. The report defines successful MDR vendors as those “focused on high-fidelity threat detection, investigation, and mitigation response with meaningful and human-interpretable reporting aligned with business-focused risks.”2
Additionally, this Gartner report provides readers with a list of mandatory and common features for the market, which creates a handy checklist for evaluating MDR vendors at a glance. These features include things like:
- 24×7 staffing that recognizes customer-specific cyber-risk-based use cases, engages daily with the individual customer data, and has skills and expertise in threat monitoring, detection and hunting, threat intelligence (TI), and remote response.
- Availability of immediate remote mitigation, investigation, and containment activities (such as quarantining hosts), beyond alerting and notification, delivered and coordinated by service providers’ staff and preapproved by end users.
- Turnkey delivery, with predefined and pretuned processes and regularly evolving detection content. It includes a standard playbook of workflows, procedures and analytics, requires a minimum viable set of telemetry to deliver services, and offers integration with third-party detection and response technologies beyond provider-owned technology.
- Hypothesis-driven threat hunting, where clients are able to identify specific threat hunt targets to determine if a threat actor was to blame. The focus would be on users of interest or where privileged data is known to have entered public circulation. This capability is different from threat hunting, which is included as part of MDR and hunts for known threat techniques.
At Expel, we believe we offer all of that (and more) with unmatched transparency on what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and why we’re doing it. We go beyond baseline incident reporting with our multi-surface auto remediation offerings, provide vast, out-of-the-box coverage for many tech integrations and attack surfaces, 24×7 SOC coverage, threat hunting across your entire environment from on-prem to cloud, and AI that enables our experts to stop real threats, faster.
The role of AI in MDR services, according to our insights from Gartner®
It’s no secret that AI is anywhere and everywhere you look these days, cybersecurity and MDR included. Expel has previously shared our thoughts on how AI will impact MDR services and SOCs, and we think the Gartner analysis of AI in the market is aligned.
“Offerings entering the marketspace in 2025 already include some solutions that position themselves as AI MDR; however, Gartner maintains that MDR is a human-led service that ‘engages daily with individual customer data, and has skills and expertise in threat monitoring.’ While there is undoubtedly some functionality carried out by MDR providers manually today that can be automated, it is incomparable to position a technological solution against the dynamic innovation that is expected by consumers of a human-led service.”3
We couldn’t agree more. Download the full report for a helping hand navigating the MDR market and finding the right provider for you.
1Gartner, Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services, Pete Shoard, Andrew Davies, Angel Berrios, 1 October, 2025.
2 ibid., p. 6
3 ibid., p. 11
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