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 teams are missing ongoing attacks because the information that they need is buried under a massive number of false positive alerts.
Extended detection and response 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 cyber attacks. Additionally, XDR leverages automation to simplify analyst workflows, allow for rapid incident response, and decrease analyst workloads by eliminating simple or repetitive tasks.
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 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.
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:
To learn more about how to implement XDR in your environment, contact us.