SIEM, SOAR, NDR, MDR, and MSSP: Making Sense of the Security Alphabet
February 2026 · 9 min read SECURITY OPERATIONS
Security teams are drowning in acronyms. SIEM, SOAR, NDR, MDR, MSSP, XDR; every vendor claims a different combination is the answer. Most organizations end up with a patchwork: a SIEM for log management, a SOAR platform for playbooks, maybe an MSSP for overnight coverage or an MDR provider for threat hunting. Each tool does something useful in isolation, but the seams between them are where threats thrive. Understanding what each discipline actually does, and where each one falls short on its own, is the starting point for building security operations that work.
SIEM: The Log Aggregator
SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) collects logs from across your infrastructure and correlates them to surface suspicious patterns. Servers, firewalls, endpoints, cloud services, and applications all feed into the SIEM, which runs rules and statistical models to flag anomalies. It's the backbone of compliance reporting, the system of record auditors want to see.
The strengths are real: centralized log collection, compliance automation for PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and HIPAA, and the ability to correlate events across otherwise siloed systems. But SIEM has well-known weaknesses. Tuning is a full-time job; out of the box, a SIEM drowns you in thousands of low-fidelity alerts per day, and reducing false positives takes months of rule refinement by people who know your environment intimately. SIEM is also inherently reactive. It processes logs after the fact, often with meaningful delay. A breach happening right now may not surface in your SIEM dashboard for minutes or hours. And log aggregation alone doesn't provide context. You see that a user logged in from a new country, but you don't know if it's a business trip or a compromised credential. SIEM tells you what happened; it doesn't tell you what it means.
SOAR: The Automation Layer
SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) was built to address one of the biggest complaints about SIEM: too many alerts, not enough action. SOAR platforms let security teams define playbooks, which are automated sequences of investigation and response steps that execute when specific conditions are met. When a phishing alert fires, the SOAR can automatically check the sender reputation, pull the email headers, query threat intelligence feeds, and either quarantine the message or escalate to an analyst.
In theory, SOAR multiplies the effectiveness of a small security team by handling the repetitive work. In practice, SOAR is only as good as the playbooks you write and the integrations you maintain. Every tool in your stack needs an API connector to the SOAR platform. Those connectors break when vendors update their APIs, when your environment changes, or when edge cases arise that the playbook didn't anticipate. Building and maintaining playbooks requires both security expertise and development skills, a combination that's hard to hire for. And SOAR doesn't generate its own intelligence; it depends entirely on what the SIEM, EDR, or other tools feed into it. If the upstream signals are noisy or incomplete, the automation just executes bad decisions faster.
NDR: The Network Watcher
NDR (Network Detection and Response) takes a fundamentally different approach from log-based tools. Instead of waiting for devices to report events, NDR observes network traffic directly: packet flows, DNS queries, encrypted session metadata, lateral movement patterns, and data exfiltration signatures. It builds behavioral baselines of what normal looks like on your network and flags deviations in real time.
NDR catches things that log-based tools miss. An attacker using stolen credentials to move laterally between servers may generate perfectly normal-looking authentication logs, but the network traffic pattern is anomalous. Data leaving your network in small, periodic bursts to an unfamiliar destination is invisible in endpoint logs but obvious in network flow data. NDR also works on unmanaged devices (IoT systems, OT equipment, guest devices) that don't run agents and don't feed logs to your SIEM. The limitation of standalone NDR is scope. It sees the network layer clearly but lacks the application-level context to always distinguish between a misconfigured service and a genuine threat. Without integration into the rest of your security stack, NDR generates its own silo of alerts that analysts have to manually correlate with everything else.
MSSP: The Outsourced SOC
An MSSP (Managed Security Service Provider) outsources your 24/7 security monitoring to a third party. They ingest your logs, watch your network, and triage alerts on your behalf. For organizations that can't justify the cost of a full in-house SOC, this is appealing: someone else handles the overnight shifts and the weekend pages.
But MSSPs have structural limitations. They run generic playbooks across hundreds of customers. They can't deeply understand your network topology, your applications, or your business context. When they see unusual activity, they either escalate to you or close it as a false positive, neither of which is ideal at 3 a.m. Response is slow because your MSSP analyst doesn't have authorization to shut down a server or revoke credentials; escalation adds hours to response time. And you're trading operational burden for vendor dependency. If your MSSP misses something, accountability is murky. Many MSSPs are optimized for cost, not expertise.
MDR: The Threat Hunters
MDR (Managed Detection and Response) is what happens when you pair dedicated human analysts with technology to actively hunt threats and guide response. Unlike an MSSP, an MDR team is supposed to deeply understand your environment. They learn your baselines, your users, your applications. When they detect suspicious activity, they investigate before alerting you. They're not just watching dashboards; they're proactively looking for things that automated rules will never catch.
A good MDR team uses behavioral data (endpoint telemetry, network flows, cloud logs) to spot intrusions early. They can tell you whether that anomaly is your backup job running at midnight or an actual incident requiring immediate containment. But MDR has a scaling problem. It's people-intensive and expensive. Most organizations can't afford dedicated 24/7 MDR coverage, so they get part-time attention, shared analyst pools, or AI-augmented MDR that fills in the gaps with varying degrees of effectiveness. And MDR providers are only as good as the data they can access; if they're limited to one telemetry source, their visibility has the same blind spots as the underlying tool.
The Real Problem: Fragmentation
Each of these disciplines solves a real problem. SIEM gives you log aggregation and compliance. SOAR gives you automation. NDR gives you network-level visibility. MSSPs give you coverage. MDR gives you human expertise. But deployed as point solutions, they create exactly the kind of environment attackers exploit: seams, handoff delays, and context gaps.
Your SIEM fires an alert on suspicious authentication. Your SOAR playbook kicks off an investigation, but it doesn't have access to your NDR data showing the same user's unusual lateral movement pattern. Your MSSP closes the alert as a false positive because it matches a known pattern in their generic ruleset. Meanwhile, your MDR provider, who could have connected the dots, is working off a different data feed entirely. Three days later, you discover the breach that was visible across all these systems if anyone had been looking at the full picture.
This isn't a hypothetical. It's the daily reality of security operations built on disconnected tools from different vendors, each with their own console, their own alert format, their own data model, and their own blind spots.
The Answer: Unified Platform, Meaningful Integration
The path forward isn't choosing one of these disciplines over the others. It's unifying all of them on a single platform, and doing so with meaningful integration into the applications and infrastructure that actually exist on your network.
A unified platform combines SIEM's log aggregation and compliance automation, SOAR's playbook-driven response, NDR's real-time network behavioral analysis, and MDR-caliber threat hunting, all under one roof, with one data model, and one view of the truth. But the integration that matters most isn't between security tools; it's between the security platform and your actual environment. Your ERP system, your cloud workloads, your SaaS applications, your OT equipment, and your identity providers are the things attackers target. A security platform that doesn't understand what's running on your network, what's normal for those applications, and what constitutes a genuine deviation is just another source of context-free alerts.
Deep application integration means the platform knows that your SAP system legitimately transfers large data sets to a specific partner every night. It means the platform understands that a new service account appearing in your Active Directory is expected because your IT team submitted a change request yesterday. It means automated response playbooks can take informed action, not just generic containment, because they understand the business context of what they're protecting.
This is where the industry needs to go, and it's what Sensilla is built to deliver. Not another point solution. Not another acronym. A platform that brings SIEM, SOAR, NDR, and MDR capabilities together with deep integration into the applications on your network, so that detection is faster, response is smarter, and your security team spends their time on threats that matter instead of correlating alerts across five different dashboards.