Due to increasingly sophisticated attacks, enterprises face difficulties with mean-time-to-detect and mean-time-to-respond. Security teams have had to utilize multiple-point solutions from different vendors resulting in alert overload, high false positive rates and no clear visibility across environments.
XDR provides solutions by consolidating granular threat visibility and automation at all layers. It ingests and normalizes volumes of data from endpoints, email accounts, servers, networks and cloud-based workloads for analysis.
Definition
An XDR solution automatically collects security data from multiple layers – including email, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads and networks – before correlating and prioritizing threat data based on severity before automating investigation and response activities. Furthermore, its unified attack detection capabilities help speed up response times while decreasing complexity and improving overall threat visibility.
Enterprise security and risk management leaders require an effective, coordinated strategy to secure their technology assets against cyber attacks but are challenged by an overwhelming flood of alerts from disjointed tools and data, limited resources, and historical operational stress levels.
XDR is an emerging security solution that provides a centralized view of security events across an extended IT infrastructure. Combining EDR and MDR elements to form one unified incident detection and response framework enables broad, integrated visibility of an organization’s entire IT landscape while eliminating blind spots while providing automated responses and simplifying operations. Most XDR solutions offer single-pane management, out-of-the-box integrations with various technologies, and a centralized platform to manage alerts with pre-tuned detection capability.
What is XDR?
XDR integrates and automates detection and response across multiple security layers, significantly improving the mean time to detect and reducing response time. It gives analysts clear visibility into how threats impact systems and their organization’s digital assets.
Contrasting EDR, which only detects suspicious activity upon first detection, XDR takes an expansive approach. It investigates how threats entered and compromised assets and uses advanced techniques such as artificial intelligence to unearth any possible forensic clues.
Security teams can use this information to pinpoint the cause and method of an attack, then use XDR to automate their response, minimizing damage while restoring business operations.
An effective XDR platform offers comprehensive visibility by collecting and normalizing volumes of data from endpoints, cloud workloads, identity services, email communications, network traffic and more – providing visibility that reduces blind spots and accelerates threat detection. Combining and correlating this information using advanced analytics with artificial intelligence/machine learning algorithms – uncovers unknown threats faster. And its open integration with third-party tools reduces vendor dependency while expanding security coverage and tool flexibility.
Benefits
Cybersecurity and security operations teams can gain numerous advantages by adding XDR to their toolset. These include:
Improved Detection & Response
With XDR, security teams needing to review fewer alerts can reduce “alert fatigue,” helping staff members focus on tasks they are best qualified for and freeing up resources to dedicate toward more pressing projects within an organization.
XDR solutions often feature an enhanced and centralized user interface that consolidates alerts from different source tools into one view, enabling security teams to better comprehend what they’re seeing while taking necessary measures to mitigate threats.
XDR solutions can also offer security teams visibility into the full attack path, giving them greater insight into an attack’s timeline and path, which may encompass emails, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads and networks within their business. Automating root cause analysis simplifies analysts to recognize any threat and respond accordingly quickly.
Vendors
Emerging technology XDR providers promise to improve the detection of threats across an extended enterprise attack surface. Security leaders should evaluate each solution’s ability to deliver on this promise by reviewing their methodologies, threat intelligence and diligence in creating its detection library. They must also check if their vendor offers full telemetry access with endpoint protection agents, network sensors, cloud hookups, and log ingestion services.
At its core, XDR vendors should deliver increased productivity to security teams by automating investigation and remediation of detected threats, thus decreasing mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-response (MTTR) while lowering overall ownership costs.
Ideal XDR solutions should include deception technology that creates fake digital artifacts designed to confuse attackers while alerting defenders about their presence, giving security teams enough information about potential threats before it hits production assets and also allowing them to reshape attack surfaces so it becomes harder for adversaries to hide on endpoints, servers or networks. Furthermore, open integrations must also be provided so organizations can leverage existing products while prioritizing threat data efficiently.
Implementation
XDR uses advanced analytics and real-time detection of threats to detect data trends and respond immediately to organizational threats, eliminating or neutralizing them before they spread further across an enterprise. While EDR and SIEM monitor endpoints and servers, XDR covers much larger attack surfaces.
Additionally, it provides improved productivity value by centralizing security information and event management (SIEM) solutions and point solutions into one seamless platform for unrivaled visibility, providing unparalleled detection of threats such as lateral movement and exfiltration by harnessing native intelligence gathered across its entirety.
XDR also reduces the mean time to detection and response while decreasing the security team workload. Automating threat investigation and response allows your brightest security personnel to focus on projects that mitigate risk exposure at reduced costs than hiring and training more in-house staff. Furthermore, its rapid reshaping abilities help decrease recurrence rates quickly by quickly updating security policies while simultaneously identifying and mitigating new or hidden threats as they emerge.