The MSP Success Thought Leaders Program invites leaders in the small business IT/MSP industry to share their insights and advice with MSP Success readers. This article was written by guest contributor Kris Laskarzewski, chief CX officer at Integris.
If your clients aren’t prioritizing endpoint security, they’re leaving the front door wide open for cybercriminals. According to IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, 90% of successful cyberattacks and 70% of data breaches originate at endpoint devices—from laptops and mobile phones to cloud-based identities. That means you, as their MSP, are on the hook to recommend the right endpoint security solutions that fit their needs, budgets, and compliance requirements.
But with so many tools on the market—EDR, MDR, XDR, ITDR—it’s easy to get lost in a sea of acronyms and features. Worse, recommending the wrong solution could leave your clients vulnerable, or saddle them with unnecessary costs and complexity.
As MSPs we need to help our clients make the smartest choice. Let’s look at the four key endpoint security options, what they do, and who needs them. Whether you work with small businesses needing basic protection or larger enterprises demanding comprehensive security, being up to speed on endpoint security options will help you become a trusted security advisor—not just another MSP providing off-the-shelf solutions.
EDR vs. ITDR vs. MDR vs. XDR: How to Explain the Difference to Clients
All these tools do two very important things—monitor devices within your networks and identities, and detect unusual activity that could indicate the presence of malware, viruses, account takeover attempts, or ransomware attacks. However, different tools cover different types of devices/services and offer different levels of service and response.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
EDR focuses on monitoring and protecting individual endpoints, such as laptops, workstations, servers, and mobile devices, from cyberthreats. It provides real-time visibility, automated threat detection and response capabilities, and is generally considered an entry-level security capability that everyone should have. It can analyze user behavior, weed out potential threats, and quarantine the threat until it can be analyzed. The forensic reporting it gives can be a great source for finding the patterns of incoming threats.
However, while EDR is a lower-cost option that’s great for smaller clients, it has some downsides. It usually doesn’t cover much beyond standard laptops, workstations, servers, and mobile devices, so you’re out of luck if your client has other assets that need protecting. Remediation is another big downside; many EDR systems don’t do anything other than flag and quarantine threats. Your client is expected to remediate any threats found—a lift too big for most small companies.
Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR)
Many also consider ITDR to be a required, “baseline” security tool, because it monitors your cloud environment for identity-related anomalies. Specifically, it is a 24/7 managed identity threat detection and response solution that protects from online account compromise, VPN misuse, token/session theft, and unauthorized access. ITDR packages can vary, but the best ones will include a combination of human and machine intelligence to focus efforts and reduce false positives. Packages should include full remediation and guidance as well, to ensure vulnerabilities are handled immediately.
ITDR is the right tool for companies that:
- Use cloud authentication services for network-joining workstations.
- Use corporate online email services.
- Have compliance and security regulation requirements.
- Use existing EDR programs.
Most companies these days have a dispersed workforce and are taking full advantage of cloud services. To keep your clients safe, it’s important to offer them, at the very least, a baseline package of EDR and ITDR.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
MDR does everything that EDR does, but it adds a level of live, staffed monitoring and remediation that’s fully “managed.” It includes continuous monitoring, threat detection, and rapid incident response, usually provided by a dedicated security operations center (SOC).
For companies with a high regulatory load, MDR is a lifesaver, automatically creating all the documentation they’ll need for regulators or cyber-risk insurers. At any moment, your MSP can pull detailed reporting of all the MDR’s monitoring and remediation activities. For many companies, that’s a convenience well worth the investment. And because MDR handles monitoring and remediation, your client can take this expensive, time-intensive task off their internal staff, saving them money in the long run.
For small to midsize companies with both a significant cloud operation and the need for the extra managed service treatment, you have a great opportunity to offer them MDR and ITDR together. However, MDR is generally not the best choice for larger companies with a complex endpoint network and/or with multiple locations. Clients with multiple or larger server rooms, large fleets of virtual host servers, multiple virtual network segments, and remote access methods, for instance, should level up to an XDR system.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
XDR does everything that EDR, MDR, and ITDR can do, but takes it a step further by integrating multiple security tools and data sources into a unified platform. XDR enhances threat detection and response across an organization’s entire digital environment. This can include laptops, workstations, servers, printers, switches, routers, firewalls, telemetry from all the preceding, and cloud services, including identity threat detection and response.
This integrated approach is a holistic security solution that is particularly beneficial for larger organizations with complex IT environments. XDR is considered the “gold standard” of detection and response tools, offering the widest range of protection, services, and reporting options.
There’s lots to love about XDR, and lots of key selling points, including:
- Fewer bottlenecks and incompatibilities between tools—it manages your whole system.
- One dedicated team that manages everything, 24/7.
- Correlated reporting between all endpoints, online identity, network devices, and firewalls, so the SOC can detect potential patterns of anomalous activity moving through a client’s systems and online identities on a unified dashboard.
- No need for upgrades—XDR can handle anything as your client grows.
Keeping It Simple
While this can seem like a lot to explain, there are ways to put it more simply. For clients that are visual learners, we’ve put together this target illustration to show how EDR capabilities are at the center of every endpoint detection tool (except ITDR), and the higher-level tools simply add on new layers of protection.
That’s really how your team should think of endpoint detection and response—like a nested Russian doll that gets bigger and more protective as you add on layers. In a world where AI-assisted scammers are producing ever more sophisticated ways to attack your client’s systems, a good endpoint protection regimen is one of the best ways you can make yourself indispensable to your clients.
For more of the latest MDR-related news, read about ESET’s recent MDR announcement at ESET World 2025.
