Exploring the Hidden Advantages of XDR for Modern Cybersecurity Strategies

XDR is necessary for any effective cybersecurity posture in a world of increasing threats and time to detect. XDR centralizes and correlates your telemetry data, automatically reduces noise, and effectively prioritizes alerts for action.

Automated Detection

XDR breaks down the siloes between layer-specific point solutions to provide overextended security teams and SOCs the end-to-end visibility they need to identify threats faster, respond to them, and resolve them quicker—and minimize the damage they cause. It integrates threat intelligence into the detection system, letting it know what attacks are common for attackers and their attack methods. This allows the XDR to prioritize alerts and automatically trigger countermeasures when it detects known attacks in your environment.

Using telemetry and data analysis, XDR can correlate context from thousands of alerts across multiple layers to surface a smaller number of high-priority alerts. Doing so reduces alert fatigue, bogging security team productivity and increasing the risk of escalating threats.

It also ensures that a single forensic artifact is not missed. It enables teams to swiftly investigate incidents and pinpoint attacker activity without manually sifting through mountains of alerts or hunting for clues in different toolsets. Adding XDR to existing EDR capabilities is critical for improving mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Beyond reducing noise and ensuring that the most important alerts are prioritized, XDR provides a clear timeline of an attack by stitching together activity logs from across multiple layers—network, endpoint, and cloud environments. Lastly, it allows communication between prevention technologies to coordinate a response to active threats and prevent future attacks through built-in integrations or application programming interfaces (APIs).

Unified Visibility

With lone attackers, hacking groups, and nation-states constantly circling your business, you need a way to see the big picture and rapidly detect and respond to any threat. This isn’t a task security teams can take on with disconnected tools from different vendors, which leaves them drowning in alerts and struggling to find the time to investigate and mitigate any threats. XDR provides holistic visibility by collecting and correlating data from all your systems, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and more to detect and surface only the highest-priority incidents. This reduces alert fatigue and streamlines investigations with automated root cause analysis.

XDR can also reduce the number of false positives your team receives, so they spend less time dealing with them and more time responding to real threats. By using telemetry and data analysis to correlate context from thousands of alerts across all layers of your security infrastructure, XDR can filter out low-priority alerts that don’t need to be responded to, cutting down on the number of alerts your team has to triage.

Reduced Alert Fatigue

With attackers agile and adaptable, security teams must be as nimble in their environments. XDR enables broad visibility and contextual understanding, reducing meaningless alerts by unifying telemetry across endpoints, networks, cloud environments, and more. The unified data is then analyzed by advanced behavioral detections, enabling faster response and uncovering threats sooner.

Unlike traditional point products, which are siloed and rely on static signatures, a true XDR platform combines the best-of-breed security tools in a coordinated approach to reduce noise and increase visibility. Open or hybrid XDR solutions integrate with best-of-breed security tools and offer APIs and connectors for seamless integration with additional systems. This allows for a true single pane of glass for analysts with curated detections, comprehensive investigations, correlated threat events, and prescriptive automated responses.

A centralized XDR solution can also feed activity data into a security data lake, which is then used for extended sweeping, hunting, and investigation at multiple layers of defense. This enables the use of expert analytics and forensic data for fewer, more effective context-rich alerts that can be sent to an SIEM system.

Automated Response

With advanced attack vectors such as stolen workstation credentials, lateral movement, and more, it can be difficult for security teams to keep up. XDR addresses this issue by providing enhanced visibility and alerting to help protect against these attacks and leveraging advanced telemetry to provide context for alerts and threat detection.

Unlike SIEM solutions that may only have access to events or telemetry from a single solution, XDR leverages the capabilities of multiple tools to offer consistent telemetry and analytics for improved detection. Additionally, it can correlate alerts from different layers of your security infrastructure, including endpoints, network, servers, and cloud workloads, to weed out low-confidence events to surface a smaller number of high-priority events for response.

Once a threat has been identified, XDR automatically triggers countermeasures and enacts mitigation responses, preventing escalation of the situation. This helps reduce the time it takes for security teams to respond while reducing the impact of an attack on your business operations and revenue.

In addition, XDR can also automate the investigative process by correlating alerts and telemetry data from multiple security layers, eliminating the need for manual, labor-intensive analysis. This allows analysts to find the root cause of an incident more quickly and effectively, including the attacker’s path through email, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and networks.