As sophisticated threats have grown, existing solutions have needed help to keep pace. XDR unifies prevention, detection, and response to improve visibility and reduce risk.
It provides granular visibility by working across layers—email, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and networks. It additionally applies situational security settings to diminish commotion and assist in danger recognizable proof.
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Extended Detection and Response
What is XDR?XDR builds on EDR by offering more thorough detection and response capabilities to defend against sophisticated threat attacks that employ numerous tactics, methods, and procedures (TTPs). The technology stack of a hybrid XDR solution is intended to complement current tools, as opposed to a single-stack XDR solution, which replaces other cybersecurity solutions.
By combining detection and alerts from an organization’s data sources into a single platform, XDR makes it easier for security analysts to gain context about an incident without managing multiple platforms. This unification also enables the security team to implement automation to simplify analyst workflows and speed up incident response time.
Threat-hunting capabilities are another core component of XDR. Advanced threats can often remain undetected for months, lurking between the layers of an organization’s cyber defenses and awaiting a trigger to set them off toward a data breach or large-scale attack. Threat hunting that is fast and effective can considerably improve an organization’s capacity to recover from a data breach or malicious behavior by lowering the mean time to detect and address such threats.
Unlike traditional enterprise security information and event management (SIEM) systems, which are primarily detection tools that can identify abnormal behavior but do not contain the ability to investigate or remediate threats effectively, XDR solutions combine SIEM telemetry with deep analytics, automated responses, and other capabilities. This unified approach to detection and response can improve SOC performance and effectiveness and enable organizations to maximize the value of their security investments.
According to Timothy A. Scott, a cybercrime attorney in San Diego, 72% of Americans feared computer hackers accessing their personal, credit card, or financial information, and 66% worried about identity theft3.
Why is XDR Important?
XDR breaks down the siloes of layer-specific point solutions standards in an organization’s security landscape, delivering unified visibility and integration. It allows an overextended security team to identify advanced threats, respond and resolve them faster, and minimize the damage they cause.
The consolidated visibility of XDR delivers deep activity detection and threat intelligence for rich data supersets, reducing the number and frequency of alerts reaching the SOC. It significantly reduces alert overload and improves the role of analysts in detecting sophisticated attacks.
For example, if a threat gains access to a server or cloud infrastructure, XDR investigates how it gained that initial entry to the network. It provides critical information to an analyst, such as how it communicates with other hosts or services within the network, which can speed up the investigation and response process.
In addition, XDR investigates how the attack affects the target workload to isolate and contain the threat before it can spread and wreak more havoc. Ultimately, XDR is a powerful complement to, or a replacement for, security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration and automation (SOAR) tools.
Look for an XDR solution with broad, integrated visibility across email, endpoints, servers, and cloud workloads, while avoiding offerings that are simply new packaging for point solutions. It’s also essential to select a solution with automated threat identification and response capabilities powered by advanced AI and proven machine learning.
How is XDR Different from EDR?
Unlike EDR, which is limited to protecting the managed endpoint, XDR goes beyond that and covers more of the organization’s digital infrastructure. By extending detection capabilities to include the network, cloud environments, IoT devices, and user personas, XDR can eliminate gaps and blindspots that commonly lead to data breaches.
XDR provides unified visibility across multiple attack vectors by centralizing alerts from an organization’s security tools into a single user interface. It reduces the number of low-quality signs that SOC teams get and helps them prioritize threat responses based on their business impact. It also improves MTTD and MTTR rates, allowing security teams to identify and respond to threats quickly.
In addition to improving visibility, XDR reduces the total cost of ownership for an organization’s security toolset by eliminating duplicate data and automating alert correlation. It can be conducive for organizations with limited budgets, as the cost of siloed point solutions can add up over time. A single tool that detects, analyzes, and prioritizes an organization’s security alerts can also free up valuable staffing resources. Moreover, the ability to automatically remediate specific threats can lower an organization’s overall risk profile and help mitigate the damage of a breach.
What are the Benefits of XDR?
The benefits of XDR are numerous, but it primarily comes down to providing visibility into advanced threats that traditional tools miss. It allows organizations to understand what’s happening in their network by combining data from multiple layers, including endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and networks. It will enable a better understanding of how an attack is progressing, which ultimately helps to prevent data loss and security breaches.
It also helps reduce alert fatigue for security teams, which can often be overwhelmed by the daily volume of daily alerts. XDR solutions can automatically filter out false positives and prioritize alerts by severity so that the most severe attacks are the first to be addressed. It ultimately enables security teams to be more effective in their roles and frees up their time for other projects.
Lastly, a good XDR solution will make it easy to analyze data, which can be done with automated analytic capabilities that help to speed up the response process. It should also be able to integrate with existing security tools and work seamlessly across the entire enterprise cybersecurity stack without additional configuration or setup. Finally, it should be easy to use so that staff can quickly learn and easily navigate the system. AED management console that unifies alerts from all systems and sources into one single platform also helps to simplify the workflow.
