The cybersecurity threat landscape is rapidly evolving and expanding. In response, many organizations are working to evolve their security capabilities to enable efficient and effective detection and remediation of unique, sophisticated, and fast-paced attacks.
The most common approach to a security platform is a “layered” approach, where an organization deploys multiple solutions – including endpoint detection and response (EDR), network traffic analytics (NTA), and security information and event management (SIEM) – to implement defense in depth across a variety of different platforms (workstations, cloud, IoT, mobile, etc.). While this approach can be effective for detecting and responding to cyber threats, it also has its limitations.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) takes a different approach. Instead of a purely reactive approach to cybersecurity, XDR enables an organization to proactively protect itself against cyber threats by providing unified visibility across multiple attack vectors.
Most organizations are struggling under a deluge of security data. While it is true that you can’t secure what you can’t see, being overwhelmed by too many low-quality security alerts has the same end result. In many cases, security operations centers (SOCs) are missing ongoing attacks because the information that they need is buried under a massive number of false positive alerts.
XDR solves this problem by providing unified and integrated data visibility and analytics across an organization’s assets. Unification enables an organization’s security team to see data collected by all security solutions from all platforms (including endpoints, mobile, cloud resources, network infrastructure, email, etc.) within a single dashboard. Integration enables analysts to take advantage of insights derived from aggregating event information from multiple different solutions into a single contextualized “incident”.
By simplifying security down to a single platform and dashboard, XDR enables a security team to effectively secure an organization against cyberattacks. Additionally, XDR leverages automation to simplify analyst workflows, allow for rapid incident response, and decrease analyst workloads by eliminating simple or repetitive tasks.
The cyber threat landscape is constantly evolving. With this evolution comes more complex and sophisticated attacks that are increasingly difficult to detect and remediate. At the same time, corporate environments are growing larger and more complex, increasing the difficulty of monitoring and securing all of an organization’s IT assets.
XDR security solutions provide organizations with unified visibility and management across their IT assets. This unification enables security teams to identify and respond to cyber threats by eliminating the time wasted by switching between solutions and providing security analysts with the context that they require to accurately identify cyber threats more effectively.
Cybersecurity is only going to grow more complex as corporate IT environments grow and cyber threats become more sophisticated. XDR is essential to an organization’s ability to scale its security capabilities and keep up with the rapid pace of change.
XDR security solutions are intended to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of an organization’s security team by reducing inefficiencies and providing analysts with the tools and data that they need to identify and respond to potential threats.
Some of the key capabilities that XDR solutions must have to accomplish this goal include:
XDR is designed to simplify security visibility across an organization’s entire ecosystem. This provides a number of different efficiency benefits to an organization:
XDR is designed to provide a security team with full visibility into all of the organization’s endpoints and network infrastructure. With this increased visibility come a number of benefits to enterprise cybersecurity:
The cybersecurity landscape is flooded with acronyms and security solutions, making it difficult to determine how a particular solution stands out from the rest. While XDR may have similar goals as EDR, MDR, and SIEM solutions, it achieves these objectives in very different ways.
Endpoint detection and response (EDR) and XDR solutions are both designed to provide integrated security visibility. However, they do so at different scopes.
EDR solutions, as their name suggests, are focused on the endpoint. EDR collects information from various sources on the endpoint, analyzes it, and provides it to security analysts for threat detection and response. EDR solutions can also respond automatically to certain threats based on predefined playbooks.
XDR solutions work at a much larger scale than EDR security solutions. XDR collects data from targeted sources all across an organization’s IT environment, analyzes it, and provides it to analysts. Like EDR, XDR provides support for threat response within the tool, rather than requiring a standalone solution.
Managed detection and response (MDR) and XDR are both designed to enhance an organization’s threat detection and response capabilities. However, they do so in different ways.
MDR involves engaging a third-party provider for threat detection and response capabilities. This external partner is responsible for identifying and responding to security incidents within an organization’s IT environment. By engaging external experts, an organization can scale and enhance its threat detection and response capabilities.
XDR improves threat detection and response using technology rather than additional manpower. By centralizing threat visibility and management, XDR eliminates inefficient context switching, automatically collects and analyzes data, and provides analysts with the context required to make threat determinations. Automation further improves efficiency by eliminating manual processes and speeding and scaling threat response.
Integrated security visibility and data analytics are essential to rapid threat detection and scalable incident response. XDR and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions both provide this capability but do so in different ways.
SIEM solutions achieve centralized visibility and management by integrating with an organization’s various security solutions, such as EDR tools. These tools can be configured to send the security data that they collect and generate to the SIEM, which normalizes, aggregates, and analyzes it. Based on the context provided by multiple sources of security intelligence, SIEM solutions can more accurately differentiate between true threats to the organization and false positive alerts.
XDR solutions take a more hands-on approach to collecting the data that they aggregate, analyze, and alert on. Instead of relying on other solutions to collect data and transmit it to them, XDR tools collect their own security data from various sources. This provides them with the same visibility and capabilities as SIEM solutions but makes them easier to configure and more robust since they are not reliant on integration with other solutions within an organization’s cyber security architecture.
The cybersecurity threat landscape is expanding, and organizations’ limited security teams are unable to scale to keep up. While a layered security approach is effective in theory, in reality, it only results in analysts missing crucial information because they don’t know where to look. Also, security teams waste time and effort monitoring and managing multiple security solutions, and these resources can be better spent protecting the organization against cyber threats.
Extended detection and response provides an alternative, using alert aggregation, data analytics, and automated threat detection and response to simplify security. An effective XDR solution provides the following properties:
Check Point’s Infinity XDR/XPR enables rapid detection, investigation, and automated response across your entire IT infrastructure, including Network, cloud, endpoint, mobile, and email security, all from a single pane of glass. To learn more about how to implement XDR in your environment, contact us today.