Bitdefender regularly surveys customers and clients to uncover the value they derive from our products and services. This enables us to focus our product development efforts and also to offer insights to security professionals on trends experienced by their peers.
When we analyzed the results of our latest survey and segmented them by company size, we found three key capabilities that mid-market customers considered most important.
Read on to discover why these, amongst the myriad of the GravityZone platform capabilities, are considered to bring the highest value.
Small and mid-market organizations face a disproportionate share of cybersecurity threats. According to the 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report nearly four times as many SMBs fall victim to attacks compared to large organizations. While mid-market organizations encounter the same advanced threats as large enterprises, they often lack the resources, cybersecurity automation tools, and expertise to defend themselves, which can make them more vulnerable.
To counter these threats, it is clear that certain cybersecurity capabilities are no longer “nice to have” for mid-market organizations. Instead, they have become essential capabilities that should be built into their primary security platform.
Detecting an attack is just the first step. For mid-market organizations with lean IT and security teams, the real challenge lies in responding quickly and effectively before the threat escalates. It’s no surprise, then, that cybersecurity automation tools can significantly lower the financial impact of a data breach. Organizations investing in security automation see breach costs reduced by $1.76M on average, according to research by the IBM Advanced Technology Group.
A key reason cybersecurity automation tools are so effective is that they can execute routine tasks, such as isolating compromised endpoints, terminating malicious processes, or rolling back changes instantly. Such functionality reduces organizational security complexity and boosts the odds of containing threats early.
Guided response adds a layer of intelligence to simplify workflows. XDR platforms provide security teams with step-by-step recommendations once a threat has been detected, including contextual insights and risk-based prioritization. This level of support helps accelerate containment and remediation and reduces the chance of costly errors during high-pressure situations.
Mid-market organizations’ IT and Security teams are often overloaded with a complex array of alerts from multiple security tools while lacking the headcount to investigate each one manually. They are acutely aware that disregarding alerts can lead to a security incident escalating or to them missing the valuable context that might clarify an incident and enable them to contain it quickly.
The event correlation performed by XDR platforms simplifies detection and response and reduces alert fatigue by aggregating signals from multiple assets and analyzing them to identify patterns and trends. Investing in this approach helps reduce complexity by allowing IT and security teams to determine whether multiple events are part of the same attack or just anomalies.
Ultimately, alert and event correlation provides a clear, prioritized view of the most critical issues, simplifying and speeding up decision-making. Connecting seemingly separate attacks to reveal the entire attack chain means IT and security teams can detect multi-step attacks more effectively and improve their response.
Business executives and stakeholders often struggle to understand the impact of the massive volumes of data generated by their IT and security teams. Following incident reporting best practices can help these teams gain credibility by enabling them to speak the language of risk that their executives understand.
Investing in technology with human-readable incident reporting makes it much easier for you to reduce security complexity and justify the value of security investments by turning data into easily digestible insights. XDR platforms should present incidents in clear language by showing exactly how breaches could affect operations.
When organizations follow incident-reporting best practices and provide stakeholders with meaningful information rather than complex jargon, they can significantly increase executive buy-in. This approach also improves readiness for audits and compliance reviews by clearly documenting incidents and responses in a clear format that aligns with regulatory requirements.
The themes above, from our customer survey, were also validated by the challenges faced in our multi-country survey of 1200 IT and cybersecurity professionals, published in the Bitdefender 2025 Cybersecurity Assessment Report.
In addition, 77% of respondents said they lack enough insight into their environment. All of these findings validate the shift underway in some XDR platforms toward preventive or proactive security capabilities.
If mid-market organizations, with their unique set of challenges, can obtain some of the capabilities enjoyed by larger enterprises that reduce their attack surface, the complexity and burden of detection and response can be significantly reduced.
Find out how.