Antivirus catches known threats by signature — it’s looking for files it recognises as bad. Modern attacks are designed to slip past that: fileless malware, living-off-the-land techniques, credential theft. EDR watches *behaviour* on the endpoint, so it can flag a normal-looking process doing something suspicious. The SOC adds the human layer — someone actually looks at the alerts that matter.

Defender is a reasonable baseline. But “baseline” isn’t the same as “monitored” — Defender will flag things, and nobody is watching those alerts. Our standard deployment replaces Defender with Datto EDR + AV, which goes deeper into endpoint behaviour, feeds directly into our SOC for human review, and gives us real response tooling when something matters.

Our SOC investigates as it happens. For confirmed threats, we move to contain them — isolating affected endpoints or blocking malicious processes — and document everything for review. You’ll get a written incident report and remediation plan, typically before you start your day.

Modern EDR agents are lightweight — most users never notice them running. On the rare occasions a specific application or endpoint runs into compatibility issues, we troubleshoot it — usually resolved by a vendor patch or a targeted exclusion. We don’t disable the agent to “fix” performance; that defeats the point of having it.

Small businesses are the favourite target for ransomware now, precisely because they’re underprotected. Attackers don’t care about size — they care about ease. The good news is that small businesses also get the most leverage from a layered defence: a few well-deployed controls (EDR + MFA + email filtering + backups) shut down the overwhelming majority of attacks.

Per-user and per-endpoint, scaled to what’s in your environment. Most clients bundle this with managed IT for a flat monthly rate. Email us with a quick description of your setup and we’ll send a quote.