With the right XDR solution, security teams can focus on high-priority threats. Look for an analytics engine fed by native sensors and telemetry to offer optimized analytical capabilities. XDR normalizes and contextualizes data from various security layers, such as endpoints, networks, cloud environments, and user personas. It also identifies anomalous activity and responds to the threat.
How Does XDR Work?
Security teams are tasked with identifying, responding to and neutralizing threats that might compromise sensitive data and systems. The longer threats remain undetected, the more opportunity they have to damage systems and steal valuable data. That’s why it is crucial to have high-quality detection and response capabilities facilitated by automated analysis and correlated alerts. XDR technology aims to make it easier and faster for security teams to respond to threats, especially when facing alert overload. XDR gathers and normalizes large swathes of data from siloed security tools across an enterprise technology environment—endpoint devices, firewalls, servers, cloud workloads and third-party applications—to detect covert threats and attack vectors automatically.
Unlike EDR solutions, which focus on protecting an endpoint and often require organizations to manually integrate them with point solutions such as network monitoring, authenticated email, and more, XDR is designed to provide integrated visibility and threat management within a single solution, simplifying the organization’s security architecture.
Rather than relying on integration between individual security products, XDR collects deep activity data from all layers of an enterprise’s technology environment—including telemetry and metadata from the endpoints, networks, servers, application platforms, and cloud workloads—to build a rich information set for extended sweeping and hunting, with strong analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). XDR analyzes and correlates this incredibly broad information set to identify and alert only the most significant, actionable threats.
What’s the Difference Between XDR and SIEM?
XDR centralizes, normalizes, and correlates data across email, endpoints, networks, servers, and cloud workloads to bring visibility and context into advanced threats. It enables them to be prioritized, hunted and remedied before they cause data loss or security breaches. The best XDR platforms integrate with security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) technologies. With lone-wolf attackers, hacking groups, and nation-states constantly circling enterprise technology assets and leveraging a sea of disconnected tools with limited integration of data or response capabilities, security and risk management leaders are increasingly considering an XDR solution’s security advantages and productivity value. They want to improve detection rates, reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and respond (MTTR) and drive a better ROI on their security investments.
An XDR solution focuses on detecting and responding to threats, primarily aggregating alerts and providing limited response capabilities. Moreover, an XDR platform ingests deeper activity and telemetry data into a data lake for extended sweeping, hunting, and investigation across layers. Combined with AI and ML-based automation, it reduces workloads for the security team to focus on the most significant alerts that need immediate attention and warrant further investigations. It translates to lower costs, better productivity, and increased security effectiveness. An XDR platform is also easier to maintain and manage than multiple-point solutions.
How Will XDR Help Thwart Attacks?
With a single XDR platform, security analysts can investigate and respond to threats with full visibility into their organization’s digital infrastructure. They can identify the attacker, analyze the attack path, and determine the impact across the business. It requires a level of knowledge and expertise that most organizations need to have in-house. XDR makes advanced response capabilities accessible to security analysts, reducing their workload and increasing performance. Unlike EDR solutions, which address security incidents through isolated endpoints, XDR ingests and normalizes large volumes of data from multiple sources, such as network traffic, devices, identity, email, cloud workloads, virtual containers and more. It then parses and correlates this data to automatically detect covert threats with advanced AI and ML.
XDR also prioritizes alerts for investigation and response, eliminating the noise that often comes with multiple alert sources. It allows less-sophisticated analysts to weed through the signs and prioritize high-confidence events for further analysis. XDR technology also ties together a series of lower-confidence activities into one higher-confidence event, reducing the time for less-sophisticated teams to assess a threat.
XDR can also connect data streams and automate response actions, including blocking, allowing and removing access from digital assets such as endpoints, networks, servers, identity, applications, cloud workloads, devices and Internet of Things (IoT) hardware. By leveraging the best of both worlds between SIEM and security orchestration and response (SOAR) technologies, XDR enables greater productivity and boosts ROI.
What Are the Benefits of XDR?
Many organizations need help with myriad alerts from disparate tools, which can result in security teams suffering from alert fatigue and ignoring high-fidelity threats. XDR centralizes alerts and provides context for fewer prioritized events to help eliminate this challenge. This approach enables security teams to proactively respond to and remediate threats without the time-consuming, manual process of reviewing thousands of individual alerts from multiple solutions. XDR identifies indicators of compromise (IOCs) and anomalous activity and automatically prioritizes investigation and analysis. It also performs root cause analysis across the threat lifecycle, enabling security analysts to see the attack path that may cross email, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads and networks. This insight helps to protect against insider attacks, ransomware and advanced zero-day malware.
Unlike EDR, XDR goes beyond simple detection to extend the reach of detection and response to your entire attack surface – whether it’s your internal network, remote work environments or public clouds. XDR is designed to complement and augment existing SIEM, security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) technologies, providing a holistic view of your defenses for centralized, prioritized event management and automated threat response. In addition, XDR is designed to improve productivity by reducing the volume of low-confidence alerts that need to be manually assessed and escalated. Doing so frees security teams to focus on the important, interesting, and valuable work they trained for.