Why Cybersecurity Matters More Right Now

The cyber threat landscape is shifting significantly. A few numbers from research shared during the webinar put this shift into context.

Google’s M-Trends 2026 Report found that global median dwell time rose from 11 days to 14 days. Dwell time is how long a bad actor spends inside a network after gaining access before being detected. The longer that window stays open, the more damage can occur — including data exfiltration, operational disruption, and full system compromise.

Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found that remediation time increased from 32 days to 43 days. Add dwell time to remediation time and you’re looking at nearly two months of a cyberattack affecting your business.

The global average cost of a data breach was $4.4 million in 2025, up 9% from the year before, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report.

AI is accelerating the problem. The World Economic Forum identified AI-related vulnerabilities as the fastest-growing cyber risk category. IBM’s X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2026 reported a 44% year-over-year increase in exploitation of public-facing applications and a 49% increase in active ransomware groups. Their recommendation: shift toward threat detection and response services.

Here’s how attackers are using AI today:

• AI-generated phishing — Attackers are creating personalized, grammatically clean emails in seconds using real business context and AI. The old “look for the typos” advice doesn’t hold up anymore.
• Credential and identity abuse — Attackers are using stolen credentials combined with legitimate tools, so there’s no obvious malware signature to flag.
• Automated reconnaissance — AI helps attackers find and exploit vulnerabilities faster and at a greater scale than manual methods ever allowed.

The shift isn’t just in volume. It’s in how fast attacks move and how hard they are to detect with traditional tools.

So, What Does This Mean for Your Business?

That’s a lot of stats, but taken together, these trends point to a significant shift in cybersecurity risk.

Attackers are gaining access faster, staying hidden longer, and using increasingly sophisticated techniques that often bypass traditional security tools. At the same time, organizations are taking longer to fully recover once a breach occurs.

For business leaders, the takeaway isn’t that cyberattacks are inevitable. It’s that prevention alone is no longer enough.

Traditional security tools like antivirus remain important, but they’re designed primarily to stop known threats. Today’s attacks increasingly rely on legitimate tools, stolen credentials, and behaviors that can look normal until damage is already underway.

That means organizations need the ability to quickly detect suspicious activity, investigate it, and respond before a minor incident becomes a major disruption.

EDR vs. Antivirus: What’s the Difference?

Antivirus is still worth having. It detects known threats using signature matching and provides an important baseline layer of protection. But it has real limits — antivirus wasn’t designed to catch unknown threats, behavioral anomalies, or credential-based attacks that use legitimate system tools.

Managed EDR is built for what antivirus misses. EDR continuously monitors work endpoints — laptops, desktops, and servers — for suspicious behavior rather than matching against a known threat library. The “managed” part matters: instead of an alert sitting in a queue, a 24/7 SOC team investigates, contains, and helps remediate the threat.

The Managed EDR process works in four stages:

Modern attacks increasingly rely on PowerShell, Windows Management Instrumentation, and stolen credentials — tools that look legitimate right up until they don’t. That’s the gap managed EDR is built to close.

A Real Incident: Contained in 52 Minutes

One of our clients deployed managed EDR across all their endpoints as a proactive measure against lateral threat spread.

After a few months a threat was alerted on Huntress EDR. An employee unknowingly clicked a link that activated a remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool. Antivirus didn’t flag it, because it was an unknown threat operating through a legitimate tool.

Here’s what happened next:

DataYard was in contact with the client throughout. We coordinated with Huntress on remediation, kept the client informed at every step, and had the system restored in under an hour.

Without managed EDR, that threat could have moved across every connected system. Full environment cleanup from lateral spread can take weeks, and that’s before accounting for data loss, operational downtime, and the cost of rebuilding client trust.

Why DataYard Chose Huntress

Huntress was founded by former NSA contractors — people whose job was breaking into systems. When they eventually asked themselves what it would take to stop someone like them, the original Huntress EDR platform was the answer. That background shapes how the product works: it’s built around the SOC team, giving detection engineers and analysts every piece of context they need when a threat appears, not just an alert to investigate blindly.

On DataYard’s end, we spent months researching and vetting managed EDR providers before selecting Huntress. The deciding factors came down to alignment. Huntress approaches security the same way DataYard approaches client support: fast response, human accountability, and clear communication.

A few other things made them stand out as well:

• 10 million endpoints, shared threat intelligence. Huntress runs across 10 million agents globally. When a threat actor reuses infrastructure — the same hostnames, the same devices — Huntress flags it across every environment simultaneously. What hits one client informs protection for all of them.
• Internal SOC, no contractors. Huntress employs their own SOC analysts distributed around the world working different hours. Every alert is reviewed by a human before any action is taken — which is why their false positive rate stays low and their mean time to response is among the lowest in the industry.
• Built to catch what antivirus can’t. Attackers typically want the same things: get in, exfiltrate data, move laterally. Huntress watches for those behaviors — including legitimate tools being used in illegitimate ways — rather than matching against known threat signatures.
• Clear reporting after every incident. After containment, Huntress delivers a packaged incident report: what was detected, when, how, and what was done. That report is useful for cyber insurance documentation and compliance needs, not just internal review.

Watch the Managed EDR Webinar Recording

On June 17, 2026, DataYard and Huntress hosted a live session on stopping cybersecurity threats using managed endpoint detection and response. Mike Beagles, DataYard’s VP of IT Operations, walked through the current threat landscape and a real 52-minute incident response. Andrew Pantaleon, Technical Account Manager at Huntress, followed with a live walkthrough of the Huntress EDR platform. Watch the full recording below.

The demo is the clearest way to see how managed EDR actually works. Watch the full recording on our webinar page.

Who Should Consider Managed EDR?

Managed EDR is most valuable for organizations that have critical systems, lean IT teams, and limited capacity to monitor and respond to threats around the clock.

If your IT team is already stretched thin, managed EDR provides continuous security monitoring and response without requiring you to build an internal security operations center.

What Managed EDR Deployment Looks Like

If you’re considering managed EDR, the deployment process is straightforward.

1. Review your current security posture We begin by evaluating your existing endpoint protection, monitoring capabilities, and visibility gaps.
2. Deploy Huntress agents DataYard handles deployment across your Windows, Linux, and macOS endpoints with minimal disruption to users.
3. Validate visibility and coverage We confirm that endpoints are reporting correctly and that monitoring is functioning across the environment.
4. Establish response workflows DataYard and Huntress work together to ensure alerts, communication paths, and remediation procedures are clearly defined.
5. Begin 24/7 monitoring and response Once deployed, Huntress continuously monitors your endpoints while DataYard remains actively involved in communication, remediation, and ongoing security guidance.

FAQ: Managed EDR