Category: Forrester Wave

Why MDR In 2025 Is About Scaling With Purpose

Forrester recently released “The Forrester Wave™: Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Services, Q1 2025,", highlighting the top 10 MDR providers out of more than 600 worldwide. While we’re honored to be recognized in such a competitive market, Rapid7’s designation underscores a fundamental difference in perspective: our customers consistently tell us that their top priority is cost-effective, comprehensive security operations at scale. They need contextually risk-aware attack surface visibility and protection without incurring exorbitant expenses, and that is precisely where we excel.

Our Mission: Monitor 100% Of What Matters—Affordably

The Wave places a premium on detection engineering and coverage breadth. We agree that those factors matter, but for most organizations, success lies in balancing coverage breadth and depth, seamless scalability, and cost constraints. You shouldn't ingest data for the sake of it—doing so drives spiraling costs and complexity. Instead, you need measured, focused monitoring of the specific data that impacts your risk profile.

What sets Rapid7 apart is our deeper understanding of the attack surface—we collect and integrate more data about the state of each customer’s environment than any other MDR provider. By honing in on meaningful, high-fidelity sources rather than chasing noise, our platform minimizes false positives and unnecessary overhead, ensuring you get the best possible visibility.

A Deeply Integrated Approach: The Key To Scalable Security

Modern security operations demand an ecosystem that brings together data from not only your endpoints, but also your networks, clouds, identities, and third-party tools—without a budget meltdown. Rapid7’s Command Platform was built precisely for this purpose, anchoring on our Next-Gen SIEM and a flexible architecture that is both data-rich and cost-conscious.

Uniquely, we deliver a fully integrated MDR experience from end to end:

  • Native SIEM Capabilities: Our platform correlates data across multiple attack surfaces, from the endpoint to the cloud, natively and in real time.
  • Deep Tech Synergy: The same models that power our vulnerability management and attack surface analytics fuel our MDR, so you gain actionable insights without juggling multiple, disconnected vendors.
  • In-Platform Partnership, Faster Resolution: Collaborate directly within the Command Platform with security veterans from our global SOC to augment internal teams and  accelerate investigations, reduce time to remediation, and build long-term resilience.

People + AI-Driven Efficiency: More Than Just Buzzwords

At Rapid7, AI isn’t a marketing tagline. We take a deliberate, responsible approach to AI and ML, building AI to power tangible improvements for our customers:

  • Faster, High-Fidelity Detections: Through machine learning on massive volumes of behavioral data, we pinpoint real threats quickly and effectively.
  • Enhanced Analyst Experience: Our AI-assisted investigations spotlight suspicious activity, giving our team immediate, context-rich information that saves you from chasing endless false positives.
  • Transparent Partnership:We don’t hide behind a “black box.” Our security analysts operate out of the same platform and share their findings with you in real time—creating a genuinely collaborative environment rather than an outsourced service.

Going Beyond The Wave: A Blueprint For Resilient Security

  • A True Partnership Model, Including Unlimited Incident Response: Our team acts as an extension of your own, giving you full-scale incident support at no extra cost. Security emergencies don’t respect budget approvals, so neither do we.
  • Unparalleled Insight Into The Attack Surface: We combine comprehensive visibility (both external and internal) with continual intelligence on attacker techniques, providing deeper context on potential exposures. Stay tuned for more announcements in this area.
  • Community Focus: Rapid7 proudly supports the broader cybersecurity community through key open-source projects like Metasploit and Velociraptor, keeping us close to innovative researchers and practitioners worldwide.

What’s Next: Continued MDR Innovation

We recognize some organizations may look at our placement in the Wave and wonder about Rapid7’s future roadmap. Rest assured, we’re just getting started:

  • Extended Cloud & Identity Threat Coverage: From AWS to Azure to Google Cloud—and major identity platforms—we’re broadening our detection capabilities to reflect attackers’ evolving tactics.
  • AI-Driven SOC Investments: Our upcoming releases significantly reduce alert noise and speed up investigations, leveraging context-based threat intelligence tailored to your specific environment.
  • Deeper Integrations and Partnerships: We’ll continue building alliances with leading technologies so your existing tools—alongside our Command Platform—deliver holistic security without the bloat.
  • See and Secure Your Attack Surface: Upcoming releases deepen our visibility into customer environments to secure the entire digital estate.

These enhancements begin rolling out next month, and we can’t wait to share how they further advance automated detection, rapid response, and proactive risk mitigation.

The Bottom Line: Effective, Affordable, and Scalable MDR

We prioritize what we know customers need. We’re focused on delivering a scalable, cost-effectiveMDR service that partners deeply with your team to optimize long-term resilience. If you need MDR that goes far beyond just the endpoint and beyond just outsourced alerting—and want to maintain your budget without sacrificing innovation—Rapid7 stands ready to transform your security operations.

Ready to explore how Rapid7 MDR can fit your needs?
Check out our Managed Threat Complete solution or reach out to our team to learn how we can help scale your success. Let’s move past the checkbox approach to MDR—together.

Rapid7 Recognized in Forrester’s 2024 Attack Surface Management (ASM) Wave Report

This week, Rapid7 was recognized as a Contender in Forrester’s 2024 Attack Surface Management (ASM) Wave report. We’re proud to have been selected for inclusion in the report, reflecting a continued dedication to enabling customers to monitor 100% of their attack surface in real-time, and proactively mitigating exposures that leave their organizations susceptible to compromise.

Since Forrester’s initial assessment earlier this year, we’ve further extended our investments in this space, announcing the acquisition of Noetic Cyber, a market-leading cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) vendor, and subsequently launching the Command Platform with attack surface management - and our new Surface Command product - as the foundation.

Modern business dynamics and an ever-evolving threat landscape makes successful data management a daunting challenge. This leads to a majority of organizations not having a strong grasp on their true attack surface.

  • Teams have accumulated numerous point solutions to try to keep pace with business growth and adapt to their changing environment.
  • Practitioners are consumed by assuming the role of a system integrator, trying to connect a myriad of different solutions that were never intended to be interoperable.
  • This lack of connectivity makes it impossible to get the context and clarity needed to actually make sense of data, know what to prioritize, and where to focus.

Attackers are able to exploit this data sprawl - lurking in mountains of data and betting on your inability to detect them and identify the insights that matter before it’s too late. We recognize that teams need a new path forward, and we are excited to support our customers through this next era of security with our Command Platform.

Establishing A Strong Foundation to Transform Vulnerability Management into a Proactive, Continuous Exposure Management Process

As cyber threats continue to grow in complexity, the traditional approach to Vulnerability Management (VM) must evolve. Static scanning and isolated patching efforts are no longer sufficient in the face of sophisticated attackers who exploit even the smallest gaps in security. Organizations need to adopt a more dynamic, integrated approach to exposure management - one that is continuous, context-aware, and capable of adapting to the sprawling attack surface and shifting threat landscape.

Rapid7 is uniquely positioned to support your organization’s evolution toward a more holistic and continuous process designed to continuously assess, prioritize, and remediate threats across an organization’s entire attack surface. Surface Command is built to provide the comprehensive visibility and actionable insights necessary for effective threat exposure management. Integrating data from across your entire environment - whether it’s on-premises, in the cloud, or somewhere in between - customers are able to see and understand risks in their full context.

With Rapid7, you’re not just getting another vulnerability or attack surface management tool; you’re gaining a partner that helps you elevate your entire security strategy. Our platform’s ability to aggregate and correlate data from different data sources ensures you have a complete, accurate picture of your threat landscape that you can trust. Moreover, our advanced querying capabilities allow you to quickly identify and focus on the most critical risks, enabling timely and precise remediation efforts.

Surface Command stands out in a few ways:

  • Unified Internal and External Attack Surface Visibility: Monitor your attack surface from the inside out with a dynamic asset and identity inventory alongside continuous external scans that provide an adversary’s perspective.
  • Vendor Agnostic Approach: Aggregate all data from your internal and external environments as well as your entire technology ecosystem into a unified asset model.
  • Powerful Search and Analytics: Slice and dice your data however you see fit, with powerful querying capabilities that help you find the needle in the haystack.
  • Seamless Integration and Remediation Workflows: Quickly get relevant asset insights, risk context and initiate remediation workflows all from one place.

This comprehensive visibility and contextual prioritization empowers your security team to shift from a reactive to a proactive posture, transforming your vulnerability management program into a robust, continuous defense mechanism.

Proactively Mitigate Exposures from Endpoint to Cloud

Exposure Command builds off the complete environment visibility powered by Surface Command - ingesting high-fidelity asset data from proprietary and third-party sources, automatically aggregating and correlating that data into an up-to-date asset inventory and topology map. Our powerful querying capabilities allow you to easily adjust your scope and drill into the details you need to spot control gaps, non-compliance and extinguish risk across your hybrid environment.

The platform goes beyond monitoring and asset inventory mapping, enriching telemetry with compliance and risk findings from Rapid7’s entire set of exposure management capabilities. With  hybrid vulnerability management, comprehensive cloud security, and web application testing in one complete solution, security teams can shift from reactive to proactive to stay ahead of adversaries.

Exposure Command extends the power of Surface Command with:

  • Pinpoint and Mitigate Vulnerabilities Everywhere: Automatically prioritize vulnerabilities across your hybrid environment based on exploitability and potential impact.
  • Monitor Effective Access and Enforce Least Privilege Access: Analyze all roles and identities across your clouds to help eliminate excessive permissions and enforce LPA at scale.
  • Proactively Mitigate Exposures in Cloud-native Apps: Avoid risk before it reaches production with IaC and web app scanning that gives actionable feedback to devs where they work.
  • Spot Avenues for Attackers to Traverse Your Cloud Network: Visualize interconnected resources and uncover paths for attackers to move laterally across your environment with attack path analysis.

With these powerful capabilities, Exposure Command allows teams to continuously assess their attack surface, validate exposures and confidently take action with remediation guidance that takes into account existing downstream controls and the blast radius of a potential compromise.

Interested in Learning More About Exposure Command?

If you’re interested in diving deeper into how Rapid7 can help transform your security operations, be sure to check out our recent webcast with Jon Schipp, Sr Dir. Product Management, and Thomas Green, Sr Security Solutions Engineer during which they discuss key strategies for leveraging Exposure Command to stay ahead of today’s evolving threats.