Most organisations treat MXDR evaluations like extended product demonstrations.
You sit through polished presentations. You watch pre-configured dashboards light up with alerts. You see impressive detection counts and sleek interfaces. Then you sign a contract, expecting the performance you witnessed to continue automatically.
But do those things actually translate to a valuable service?
The problem is simple: you've assessed capability, not value. You've watched a vendor showcase their platform in a controlled environment, but you haven't proven whether their service delivers measurable outcomes in your specific context.
A proper Proof of Value (PoV) changes that equation entirely.
The first mistake organisations make is treating a POV like a technical trial.
They jump straight into setup: connecting data sources, running detections, generating dashboards without establishing what value looks like. The result is impressive activity with zero clarity. You end up with lots of alerts but no measurable improvement in your security posture.
Before any technical work begins, lock down three things:
“Clarity comes before capability. If success isn’t defined upfront, no MXDR provider can prove meaningful value in your environment.”
— Lewis Pack, Head of Cyber Threat Defence
This foundation transforms your POV from "let's see what this MXDR can do" to "let's prove what this MXDR delivers."
Vendors love vanity metrics. Total alerts detected. Events processed per day. Number of data sources integrated.
None of these proves operational value.
We recommend you focus on these three measures that demonstrate real impact:
When combined, these three metrics give you a complete view: operational efficiency, analytical precision and business impact.
A serious POV begins by mapping your operational reality.
Understand your business-critical systems. Map your Microsoft security footprint: Defender for Endpoint, Sentinel, Entra ID, Purview, M365, Azure workloads. Identify your top threat vectors: credential abuse, ransomware lateral movement and data exfiltration from M365.
Then pick three to five representative attack scenarios that matter to you.
Test across the entire attack progression. Simulate initial access through phishing or credential theft. Execute suspicious PowerShell or malicious macros. Trigger persistence and lateral movement through admin account misuse. Attempt to exfiltrate data from SharePoint or OneDrive.
This moves beyond "alert triggered" into "how well did the MXDR see, understand and respond?"
“Real-world scenarios matter. A POV must reflect your actual Microsoft estate and threat profile, not a vendor’s scripted demo.”
— Lewis Pack, Head of Cyber Threat Defence
Validate integration depth with your Microsoft stack. Are detections built on native Microsoft telemetry? Can the SOC automatically correlate incidents across Microsoft 365 Defender, Sentinel, and third-party feeds? Do response playbooks use Microsoft-native controls, isolate the host via Defender, disable Entra ID account or rely on manual intervention?
A mature MXDR provider demonstrates detection and automated response directly through your Microsoft stack.
Most mid-market organisations lack the internal expertise to design and run complex test scenarios themselves.
The solution is not to build a sprawling project team. Establish a POV Steering Unit—three to five people maximum—who can make quick, informed decisions.
You need a business sponsor who defines outcomes and maintains alignment with strategy and budget—a technical authority from IT or Security Ops who understands your environment. The MXDR partner's technical POV owner is accountable for execution and measurement. Optionally, a compliance or risk representative to ensure evidence maps to regulatory objectives.
This small group meets weekly, focusing purely on outcome review.
Create a POV Charter at kickoff: a one-page agreement that outlines objectives, scope, metrics, evidence format and review cadence. This ensures the provider does heavy lifting under your definition of success.
Use the provider's expertise without surrendering control. They design, execute and tune test scenarios. You approve relevance, observe execution and review results. Think of it like a driving test: you're in the passenger seat, not the engine bay.
Two weeks might satisfy a procurement spreadsheet, but it won't validate operational performance.
A two-week POV proves one thing: the MXDR platform can technically connect and display data. You'll confirm log ingestion works and see a few detections triggered. What you won't get is meaningful trend data, evidence of tuning over time or real visibility into SOC analyst quality.
The minimum viable timeline is four to six weeks.
Week one establishes the foundation and baseline. Weeks two and three run realistic attack simulations mapped to your threat profile. Weeks four and five allow the provider to adjust analytics and playbooks based on early findings. Week six validates improvements and translates technical metrics to business impact.
This timeframe allows learning cycles to occur. The true test of a mature MXDR partner is not how they perform on day one, it's how they adapt by week four.
Your technical team walks away thrilled with detection graphs and response metrics. The CFO sees another cost centre asking for a budget.
Bridge that gap by translating operational gains into financial and strategic outcomes.
Reframe MTTD and MTTR improvements as faster containment that reduces downtime and business interruption costs. Position detection of quality gains as efficiency wins: fewer wasted analyst hours, lower headcount pressure, faster decisions. Express risk reduction as a quantified reduction in the likelihood or impact of costly incidents.
Quantify financial impact using conservative assumptions. If MTTD drops from 24 hours to four hours, estimate how that reduces potential loss. If detection quality improves by 30%, quantify the equivalent reduction in manual triage hours. If improved coverage aligns with NIST CSF or ISO 27001, assign a range of financial benefits, from lower cyber insurance premiums.
Present the outcome as an investment decision. State the business challenge. Share POV findings. Translate to business impact. Build the investment case with return ratios. Show strategic alignment with cyber resilience objectives and compliance roadmap.
“A strong POV turns technical noise into business evidence. When you link Microsoft-native detections to measurable risk reduction, investment becomes an easy decision.”
— Lewis Pack, Head of Cyber Threat Defence
A POV that ends with graphs gets ignored. A POV that ends with a quantified business case tied to risk, continuity and ROI gets funded.
The final POV week should not end with a summary deck.
Roll straight into a 30-day continuity period where the same playbooks, telemetry and analysts remain live whilst ownership transitions from the POV team to steady-state MXDR operations.
Validate that configurations tuned during the POV are locked in. Ensure data flow stability across Microsoft Sentinel, Defender, Entra and other feeds. Benchmark performance metrics against POV results under normal production load.
Document the proven configuration baseline before production go-live. Capture specific Sentinel analytics rules, incident response playbooks, integration mappings, log retention parameters and alert routing paths. This becomes your "known-good baseline" for calibration if post-go-live performance drifts.
Build KPIs and SLAs directly from POV metrics. Use your actual POV results as contractual benchmarks. Average MTTD and MTTR set target thresholds. True positive and false positive ratios define acceptable accuracy margins.
Treat the first 60 to 90 days in production as hypercare. The same analysts from the POV remain assigned. Weekly performance reviews track metrics against POV baselines. Any tuning gaps trigger immediate corrective cycles.
The best MXDR POV is not a technology test. It's a working rehearsal for the partnership you'll live with afterwards.
Observe how the provider behaves when things go wrong. Do they hide behind tooling or collaborate transparently to fix and learn? Watch their analysts in action. Are they contextualising the findings in business language, or are they just sending alerts? Gauge communication rhythm. Do they explain, document and educate, or drown you in reports you can't act on?
Check adaptability. Do they adjust playbooks as your environment evolves, or stick rigidly to predefined templates?
These behaviours tell you far more about future success than any metric. An MXDR that nails the tech but fails the human interface will still leave you chasing clarity after go-live.
Mid-market organisations rarely have huge internal SOC teams. Cultural alignment, trust, responsiveness, clarity are effectively part of your security stack.
If you take one thing from this, make it this: define what value means before you plug anything in and make the provider prove it on your terms.
Most MXDR POVs fail because no one agrees on what success looks like until it's too late. The vendor runs a polished showcase. The internal team gets dazzled by alerts and dashboards. Procurement sees no quantified business impact.
Define measurable success criteria before the first connector is deployed: tied directly to your operational risk, Microsoft stack and business priorities. Document clear outcomes. Lock those into the POV charter as success gates. Align all stakeholders on these metrics so everyone evaluates value using the same yardstick.
With that discipline in place, you avoid two traps: being dazzled by activity that doesn't equal value and finishing with great technical data but no business case.
A well-defined, outcome-driven POV turns your MXDR evaluation into an evidence-based investment decision. You won't just run a POV; you'll validate your future security operating model.
If you want to strengthen how you translate a POV into a clear, confident board-level decision, the final session in our three-part Boardroom Series explores this in depth.
The series brings together the perspectives boards care about most, from investment rationale to operational performance. Each session is designed to give security leaders a clearer path from strategy to measurable outcomes.