XDR combines activity data from multiple layers into a single, secure, structured data lake for extended detection, analysis, and response. This reduces the attack surface, increases visibility into advanced threats, and improves operational efficiency.
Increased Operational Efficiency
In addition to improving visibility and context, XDR helps reduce the time InfoSec teams spend investigating alerts. This is because it automatically analyzes and correlates activities across security layers. This can lead to fewer, higher-confidence alerts. This can free up human resources to focus on other tasks that are better suited for them and help eliminate the risk of alert fatigue. But what is XDR to business and security?
XDR unifies data streams from different tools and sources into a single, easy-to-use platform. This can make it much easier to start investigations and identify potential threats. It can also simplify the process of creating playbooks, which can be used to automate and speed up repetitive processes that require manual intervention. This can help improve operational efficiency and enable teams to detect and respond to threats faster.
In addition, XDR can help reduce the number of false positives, significantly reducing the overall volume of alerts for MSPs to manage. This can help them prioritize their investigation efforts and make informed decisions that improve their security posture. This is especially important for MSPs struggling with the cybersecurity skills gap, as they may need more skilled personnel to handle their alerts. Before purchasing, it’s important to understand what XDR will and won’t cover and its capabilities and limitations.
Improved Threat Visibility
Modern threats are often multi-vector and can evade traditional security tools and techniques. This results in a lack of visibility into threat activity, increasing the mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR). XDR addresses these challenges by providing security teams with a single platform for detection and response. Using advanced forensics, analysis, and investigative capabilities, XDR can reveal hidden connections between seemingly unrelated incidents to uncover the true nature of attacks and deliver real-time alerts for immediate response.
Rather than using multiple products to perform the same functions, a single-unifying XDR solution is less resource-consuming. It allows employees to focus on more complex projects that require human attention. This enables teams to reduce the alerts they receive and improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
It also increases detection speed and provides actionable intelligence so organizations can quickly identify and stop ransomware, malware, memory-only, and fileless attacks. Moreover, a quality XDR solution will be able to remediate and remove detected threats automatically, update policies to prevent future attacks and provide remediation suggestions.
Lastly, a good XDR solution will reduce the impact of a cyberattack on an organization by preventing the spread of malicious code from one compromised host to another. This will enable companies to avoid costly data breaches, customer loss, and other negative effects of a cyberattack.
Accelerated Incident Response
Detection and response to cyberattacks require a broad attack surface coverage, deep integration, and an integrated solution that focuses on all three steps of detection, investigation, and response. XDR eliminates blind spots in your security strategy with the ability to monitor all traffic from your network, servers, and endpoints for indicators of infection or attack.
By streamlining alerts into a single, unified platform and delivering streamlined forensics, you’ll reduce the manual work your cybersecurity team has to perform and maximize their time and abilities. This can help you address the cybersecurity skills gap and avoid slowing down your security posture.
Threat actors continuously change tactics and evolve to evade traditional detection controls, causing security teams to suffer from alert fatigue and missing some of the most serious threats. XDR can improve your SOC’s visibility and reduce the likelihood of missing a serious threat with its advanced threat intelligence and automated responses that rely on external, proactive threat intelligence to ensure all parts of your infrastructure are covered.
Unlike SIEM and SOAR solutions, XDR uses extended endpoint telemetry to provide out-of-the-box threat detection backed up by a comprehensive context of the detected activity on your endpoints. This gives analysts the information they need to identify and prioritize an incident and act accordingly quickly.
Reduced Risk
When a high-quality XDR solution is implemented into the network, the benefits to organizations vary. Organizations will experience a reduced risk due to the broad attack surface coverage and deep integration that enables accelerated threat detection, investigation, and response.
Powershell path Using artificial intelligence (AI) technology, a quality XDR solution will learn over time and become more effective in protecting against known threats and new ones that may emerge. XDR solutions will also require far less human intervention than traditional ones, helping reduce alert fatigue for overworked security and IT teams.
Effective XDR solutions must reduce the noise by grouping related events and combining telemetry data from multiple sources across an organization’s IT ecosystem. Those tools must also be capable of understanding the context of those events, detecting the tactics, techniques, and procedures of attackers, and enabling faster and more accurate threat identification and response.
Finally, a well-implemented XDR solution should enable a rapid response to threats, minimizing the potential for data loss or unauthorized access and ensuring compliance with regulations that require prompt breach notification and resolution.
