Cybersecurity for Every Client: Why MSPs Prefer Field Effect MDR

Recorded live on February 6, 2025.

Why MSPs prefer Field Effect MDR

As an MSP, you are probably more aware than most that cybersecurity is a challenge. The real question is not whether your clients face risk, but what you can actually do about it efficiently, profitably, and without burning out your team. In this webinar, Libby Robinson, Director of Product Marketing at Field Effect, walks through the headwinds your clients are facing, the burden that has quietly shifted onto MSPs, and how Field Effect MDR is built to help you carry it.

The headwinds your clients are facing

Three forces are making cybersecurity harder for SMBs right now.

• Cybercrime is increasing. SMBs are more targeted than ever. Threat actors are not picky: if there is value to extract, they will try to extract it. And the frustrating reality is that a significant proportion of successful attacks could have been prevented.

• Cyber insurance is getting harder to obtain. A few years ago, a cyber insurance application for a small business might have been seven questions. Today, that same application can run to 33 pages. Insurers started paying out a lot of claims and responded by tightening requirements substantially. For SMBs trying to qualify, and for MSPs helping them navigate it, the complexity has grown enormously.

• Compliance is expanding. Once largely confined to heavily regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and legal, compliance frameworks are now becoming a baseline expectation across a much broader range of businesses. Many MSPs are already using universal cybersecurity frameworks as their standard measurement for client security posture.

The burden has shifted to MSPs

The natural response for most SMBs has been to hand this problem to their MSP. That reflects something real: MSPs genuinely care about protecting their clients. But accepting that responsibility does not make it easy to deliver on.

Cybersecurity skill is scarce and expensive. You cannot simply hire your way to a large, cheap pool of security talent. And the tools available have presented something of a paradox of choice. On one end, sophisticated platforms built for enterprise SOC analysts: powerful, comprehensive, but complex to operate and priced accordingly. On the other end, more accessible and affordable options that sacrifice threat surface coverage and response speed to get there. Neither is quite right for the MSP trying to profitably service a mixed client base.

The business impact of this squeeze shows up in margins. If comprehensive coverage requires only your most experienced L3 technicians to manage it, that is expensive talent tied up in work that could otherwise be delegated. If you trade down to something cheaper, you are accepting slower response times and reduced coverage. And either way, every dollar spent on reactive recovery after an incident is money that could have been saved by preventing it.

Cybersecurity that works for you, not against you

One of the most common patterns Libby's team sees when responding to breaches is that the organization actually had security tools in place. The tool detected something. It generated an alert. But that alert either did not communicate clearly enough to prompt action, or it was buried under so much noise that it got missed entirely.

That is the difference between cybersecurity that works at you and cybersecurity that works for you. Having a tool that fires alerts is not the same as being protected. The tool needs to communicate clearly, early, and in a way your team can act on, without requiring a second monitor and a Google search to decode what it is trying to tell you.

The Field Effect approach

Field Effect MDR was purpose-built for MSPs and the SMBs they serve. That starting point shapes every design decision: what information to surface, how to present it, and how to make it manageable for teams of all sizes and skill levels.

• Comprehensive defense. Real protection requires more than response after the fact. The goal is to reduce risk before an incident occurs, identify threats early across the full threat surface, and respond quickly when needed. Field Effect MDR covers endpoint, cloud, and network, detecting both known threats and emerging zero-day activity. Active response is built in and configurable: you can set it globally, per customer, or even per device, so your team is not left deciding whether to act when something looks wrong.

• Unified, integrated visibility. Attackers do not limit themselves to a single vector. They look for any way in and move laterally once they have a foothold. Defending against that requires visibility across the full threat surface. The key distinction in Field Effect's approach is that all components were built natively to work together. That cross-talk between endpoint, cloud, and network is what allows the system to distinguish between something that merely looks anomalous and something that is genuinely threatening, and consolidate what would otherwise be a flood of individual alerts into a single, meaningful signal.

• At the center of the platform is what Field Effect calls its advanced analytics engine. It combines technology intelligence and human analyst intelligence, processes it at scale using machine learning, and continuously learns from every new piece of analyst insight. The result is a system that can operate at a volume no purely human team could match, while still surfacing only what is actually worth your attention.

• Total clarity through AROs. Field Effect communicates through AROs: Actions, Recommendations, and Observations. These are not traditional alerts. They are plain-English instructions, written to be consumable by an L1 technician without cybersecurity jargon. Each one tells you not just what happened, but what to do about it.

The result partners consistently report is that they can hand cybersecurity off to L1 techs, freeing L2 and L3 staff for higher-margin work. Noise-free does not mean quiet: it means you are told what you need to know, when you need to know it. Beyond AROs, the platform provides risk-first views across endpoints, accounts, and vulnerabilities, and a range of reports that highlight security posture strengths and gaps across your entire client base.

MDR Core and MDR Complete: a solution for every client

Field Effect MDR comes in two tiers designed to serve your entire client base, from the most compliance-driven enterprise client down to the small business that just needs reliable, affordable protection.

MDR Complete is Field Effect's most comprehensive offering, suited to clients with more complex IT environments, compliance or cyber insurance requirements, or the need to report security metrics to a board. It includes everything in MDR Core plus network monitoring, SaaS application monitoring (Salesforce, Okta, Duo, AWS, ServiceNow, and more), DNS filtering, monthly dark web monitoring, and enhanced threat analysis that extends to low-confidence alerts. Reporting is richer, with dashboards and trending data that let you demonstrate security posture improvement over time.

MDR Core is Field Effect's newest tier, built for smaller businesses or those earlier in their security journey. It includes endpoint protection, MDR for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, external threat scanning, 24/7 SOC monitoring, active containment, and proactive risk reduction. Critically, it runs the same analytics engine as MDR Complete. There is no dialed-back version of the technology. The difference is in scope, not in quality.

The two tiers are not competing options. They are designed to work together across a mixed client base, letting you place each client in the right tier today and move them to Complete as their needs grow. Partners are already seeing clients start on Core and graduate to Complete within a matter of months.

Both tiers include bidirectional PSA integration with your preferred ticketing tools, so AROs feed directly into the environment your techs already work in and resolve back automatically when addressed.

Streamlining your stack and growing your margins

For many MSPs, the cumulative cost of maintaining multiple security tools is significant, both in licensing fees and in the technician time required to manage them. Field Effect MDR is designed to consolidate that stack, replacing multiple point solutions with a single platform that covers more ground with less operational overhead.

The margin improvement comes from several directions at once: lower tooling cost, fewer tool management hours, and the ability to move cybersecurity from L3-only territory into L1 hands. One partner, when asked what he would tell other MSPs in five words, said: "More bang for your buck."

For MSPs looking to move into MSSP territory and add a managed security practice, Field Effect provides the platform and the partnership to make that viable. That includes a partner portal with sales and marketing assets, ready-made customer education campaigns, cybersecurity training with hands-on labs for your team, co-selling support from Field Effect's sales and technical sales staff, a dedicated customer success manager, performance incentives, and direct input into the product roadmap.

Field Effect does not build features in isolation. MSPs are the primary customers, which means partners are involved in piloting new capabilities before general availability and their feedback shapes what gets built next.

Q&A

What was the biggest piece of feedback that told you MDR Core was on the right track?

Field Effect rolled out MDR Core to around 20 early adopter partners starting in October 2024 before expanding more broadly. The rollout involved detailed line-by-line walkthroughs of what was included in MDR Core versus MDR Complete, including pricing.

The most common response from partners at the end of those conversations was: "Awesome, can I start selling this now?"

Within a couple of months of launch, several partners already had clients that started on Core and moved up to Complete. That combination of immediate partner enthusiasm and early customer progression through the tiers was a strong signal that the approach was right.

What does pricing look like?

Field Effect prices per user, not per endpoint. The reasoning is practical: there are typically one and a half to two endpoints per user, plus cloud accounts that deduplicate, so per-user pricing is simpler and more predictable. It also aligns with how most MSPs bill their own clients.

Pricing is tiered based on total user count, with different bands as volume increases. For partners who already have MDR Complete customers, there is an introductory offer that allows you to start Core customers at a higher band for better pricing. For specific pricing, reach out to a Field Effect account rep directly.