Outcomes Over Alert Queues: Rebuilding MDR Around Speed
Almost everything that matters in security operations happens in the gap of time between detection and response. For most managed detection and response (MDR) providers, the gap is governed by human analyst capacity.
For years, the standard answer to threat velocity has been to hire more people. But a service built on human analysts reviewing alerts, running manual or semi-automated playbooks, and passing tickets back to the customer has a built-in bottleneck. Adding headcount widens the alert queue without changing its nature or actually solving the problem.
Attacks that execute in seconds don’t wait for a shift change. Not to mention more people means higher MDR prices that customers have to bear. Something has to give.
Coalition acquired Wirespeed for its ability to stop cyber threats in milliseconds. Now, the market is demanding the very things we do best: robust detections, near-instant investigations that lead to clear verdicts, and threat containment instead of escalations.
Coalition was recognized in The Managed Detection And Response Services Landscape, Q3 2026 report by Forrester Research Inc.
A Changing Landscape for Security Operations
Organizations of all sizes have security stacks fragmented across endpoint, cloud, identity, SaaS, and operational technology (OT) with attack surfaces that have been growing faster than any security team can hire against. These are the compelling reasons why organizations look to third-party MDR services to keep their heads above water.
With a fragmented market of MDR providers, further impacted by the adoption of AI, the basis of comparing vendors has moved. Multivendor telemetry, 24/7 coverage, and case management have long been table stakes, but they’re not enough.
Verifiable security outcomes were a longstanding objective for customers evaluating MDR services. That’s one reason the market adopted “MDR” over “MSSP” many years ago. What separates MDR providers now is how far automation is allowed to go.
With a fragmented market of MDR providers, further impacted by the adoption of AI, the basis of comparing vendors has moved.
Where Speed Actually Matters
Wirespeed addresses managed SIEM and log management, OT and IoT detection and response, and security posture improvement. Beyond these capabilities, Wirespeed serves the full set of scenarios that MDR buyers most often seek.
In fact, Wirespeed was built from the ground up to be a fully automated, deterministic-first AI-SOC, with human oversight only for escalated cases.
Managed SIEM & Log Management
Anyone who has used an MDR provider or two knows that there's a great deal of variability in what “managed SIEM” actually means. Smaller, boutique providers may invest heavily in a customer’s existing SIEM deployment, but that comes at the cost of scaling service delivery across dozens of customers. Their inability to scale affects their margins, which, in turn, can create pressure to cut back on service quality to make up for it. Large scale MDR providers often take the opposite approach and can force you into their managed platform, where you may get less control and less value out of your current security investments, whether you like it or not.
Wirespeed syncs your detection rules and uses AI to categorize them to our taxonomy, so we can provide full investigations in milliseconds when they fire an alert.
Wirespeed strikes a great balance. We ship with our own built-in SIEM, 85+ integrations that connect quickly with nothing on-prem, and include both our own managed detection rules and the ability for you to write your own rules in natural language with AI. And we also support the major SIEM platforms organizations already own and love: We sync your detection rules and use AI to categorize them to our taxonomy, so we can provide full investigations in milliseconds when they fire an alert.
AI Detection & Response
Many MDR providers have bolted on AI to assist with investigation, but that’s very different from letting a machine act without a person in the critical path — the latter is what buyers are often uncomfortable with. AI assistance alone isn’t achieving the fastest possible threat containment times because it still requires a queue of detections for humans to review.
With Wirespeed, alert noise falls 99.99% before anything reaches your queue.
Wirespeed is deterministic-first, running telemetry to detections to automated investigation to verdict to response, with expert humans supervising through statistical sampling under Acceptable Quality Limits (ISO 2859) rather than approving each case. That's how our 0.000067% critical defect rate gets measured rather than asserted, and why verdicts and remediation land in milliseconds on actions the customer pre-authorized.
With Wirespeed, alert noise falls 99.99% before anything reaches your queue, and investigation always stays unmetered: no consumption pricing, no AI token burn.
OT/IoT Detection & Response
Invasive agents may not run on a legacy PLC, and a broad kill command across a medical device network or a SCADA environment could turn a security incident into a physical safety disaster. MDR providers typically struggle to learn their customers’ environments; configuration management databases are often incomplete, and human analysts are under too much time pressure to pause and figure out if an alert is coming from an OT device.
Wirespeed contains threats on IT systems while leveraging OT/IoT asset data to carefully and rapidly escalate to your in-house experts for special handling.
Wirespeed counters this problem by integrating with your asset management systems. We pull asset tags from Entra, your EDR, your attack surface, and vulnerability management tools (like Axonius), so our deterministic-first verdicts can handle critical assets with due care. Wirespeed contains threats on IT systems while leveraging OT/IoT asset data to carefully and rapidly escalate to your in-house experts for special handling. We also integrate with innovative detection products, like Sandfly, that run agentlessly for critical OT systems when agents on devices are a business risk.
From drilling rigs to research lab equipment to pharmaceutical manufacturing systems, the question worth putting forth to any MDR provider is how they can confidently state they can monitor environments with a mix of IT and OT/IoT systems without simply escalating everything.
Exposure Management
Detection describes what is happening; exposure describes what could happen. Usually, the two are bought from separate vendors.
Coalition acquired Binary Edge to make attack surface management a core component to both our insurance underwriting and our ongoing assistance to policyholders. Our Active Data Graph combines our own scanning engine with intelligence from incidents across the globe, not to just let you know what could theoretically become a material impact breach, but what is most likely to become material. (We also offer this service for third-party risk management of your suppliers, as well.)
Security Posture Improvement
Most vendors handle a case by launching a ticket with a recommendation over the fence, which hands the work back to the customer at the moment it matters most.
Data from security scans and incidents across the globe feeds back into both the accuracy of Wirespeed's investigations and the posture recommendations that come along with them.
Wirespeed executes the remediation steps instead, through response actions you approve in advance, and leaves a record of what happened so you can review afterward. Patterns of behavior come with posture recommendations, and you can choose to enforce stricter security hygiene in your organization, like not allowing the use of privacy VPNs or residential proxies to log into corporate systems, by overriding our verdict settings.
Data from security scans and incidents across the globe feeds back into both the accuracy of Wirespeed's investigations and the posture recommendations that come along with them.
Why We Built Wirespeed
Legacy MDR broke down because it assigned human analysts with the stress of an air traffic controller landing thousands of planes per hour. The result is delays, inconsistent handling of investigations, unverified tickets, and customer escalations without immediate containment actions — all while attacks unfold in seconds.
Wirespeed inverts the order. Applying deterministic-first execution within pre-authorized guardrails, Wirespeed gathers evidence, logs every decision step, reaches a verdict and contains the threat in milliseconds, and delivers investigations the customer can audit afterward.
In an era of machine-speed attacks, the distance between a verdict and a response is the whole contest. Wirespeed closes it in milliseconds.
LIGHTNING-FAST SPEED. LASER PRECISION.
Wirespeed Automated Detection & Response
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