According to analyst firm Gartner, Extended Detection and Response (XDR) is “a SaaS-based, vendor-specific security threat detection and incident response tool that natively integrates multiple security products into a cohesive security operations system that unites all licensed components.”
XDR enables an organization to go beyond typical detective controls by providing a holistic yet simplified view of threats across the technology landscape. XDR provides real-time information needed to deliver threat intelligence to business operations for better, faster results.
Advanced detection and response (XDR) primary benefits include:
- Enhanced protection, detection, and response capabilities.
- Improved productivity of operational security personnel.
- The lower total cost of ownership for effective security threat detection and response.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) promises to consolidate multiple products into a unified security incident detection and response platform. XDR is a logical evolution of Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions into a primary incident response tool.
Why do enterprises need XDR security
SoCs need a platform that intelligently pulls together all relevant security data and uncovers advanced adversaries. As adversaries employ more complex tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to successfully circumvent and exploit traditional security controls, organizations are scrambling to secure an increasing number of vulnerable digital assets both inside and outside the traditional network perimeter. Security teams have historically been stretched for years, and with recent demands to work from home, the strain on resources has intensified-security professionals must once again do more with the same or fewer resources and with strict budget constraints. Organizations need unified and proactive security measures to protect the entire landscape of technology assets that span legacy endpoints, mobile and cloud workloads without overburdening staff and internal management resources.
With bad actors like” lone wolf ” attackers, hacking groups, nation-states, and even potentially malicious insiders constantly circling, enterprise security and risk managers must overcome too many separate security tools and data sets from too many vendors. Security personnel struggle with a sea of data that leads to alarm overload, too many false alarms, and poor integration of data into analytics tools or incident response, all under historical operational stress.
Enterprise security and risk management executives should consider the security benefits and productivity value of an XDR solution.
How does XDR work?
The primary value propositions of XDR products or capabilities include improving the productivity of security operations by enhancing detection and response capabilities through unifying visibility and control across endpoints, networks, and the cloud. XDR ingests and distills multiple telemetry streams. XDR can also analyze TTPs and other threat vectors to make complex security operations capabilities more accessible to security teams that lack the resources for more tailored point solutions. XDR removes the daunting detection and investigation cycles and provides threat-centric and business context to respond to the threat faster.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) – Security provides advanced threat detection and response capabilities, including:
- Detection and response to targeted attacks.
- Native support for behavioral analysis of users and technology assets.
- Threat intelligence including shared local threat intelligence in conjunction with externally acquired threat intelligence sources.
- Reduce the need to track false positives by automatically correlating and validating alerts.
- Integration of relevant data for faster and more accurate incident triage.
- Centralized configuration and hardening capability with weighted guidelines for prioritizing activities
- Comprehensive analytics.
What are the benefits of XDR?
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) products add value by consolidating multiple security products into a unified security incident detection and response platform. XDR is an efficient evolution of Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) platforms into a primary incident response tool. Detecting today’s advanced threats requires more than a collection of point solutions. XDR can optimize the response with extended context.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) – Security provides advanced threat detection and response capabilities, including:
- Converting a large stream of alerts into a much smaller number of incidents for the manual investigation to focus on.
- Providing integrated incident response options with the necessary context from all security components to quickly resolve alerts.
- Provide response options that extend beyond infrastructure control points, including network – and endpoints.
- Provide automation capabilities for repetitive tasks.
- Reduce training and up-level Tier 1 support by providing a common management and workflow experience for all security components.
- Deliver usable, high-quality detection content with little to no reconciliation.
- XDR enhances critical SOC functions when responding to an attack in their environment:
Detection
Identify more and more meaningful threats by combining endpoint telemetry with a growing list of security control providers and security events captured and analyzed by security intelligence and analytics platforms.
Investigate
Human-machine teaming correlates all relevant threat information and applies situational security context to reduce signal through noise faster and help identify the root cause.
Recommendations
Provide analysts with prescribed recommendations to drive an investigation through additional queries and provide relevant response actions that can most effectively improve mitigation or remediation of a detected risk or threat.
Hunting
Provide a common query capability for a multi-vendor sensor telemetry data repository in search of suspicious threat behavior, enabling threat hunters to search and take action based on recommendations.
A comprehensive XDR platform requires a vendor that can provide a product portfolio and partner ecosystem with breadth, depth, and market maturity to seamlessly and meaningfully connect and correlate detections across multiple alerts. Automatically make sense of context, prioritize risk, and derive a response that can be easily orchestrated across the enterprise.
