Detect. Analyze. Prioritize. Take your time back with XDR.
If you’re reading about cyber security anywhere these days, you’ll already know there’s a lot of talk about XDR (Extended Detection and Response) technology and its benefits. You might also see that there is a lot of confusion about what XDR actually means. So what is it, anyway? Let’s dive in.
We could give you the textbook definition, but let’s take our cue from the XDR technology itself and simplify to level up our sophistication.
XDR, or Extended Detection and Response, is garnering attention in the security world as an elegant integrated approach to identify, respond to and manage security threats.
What does it do? And, what does ‘integrated approach’ mean?
XDR takes multiple security technologies and transforms them into a security system. Imagine you have multiple programs, each good on their own, and each working to protect, detect and respond to security threats on their own. You’ve got everything you need to react to threats, right?
That sounds great until you realize that you may receive dozens of alerts from multiple technologies from a single incident creating what might be a lot of noise and potentially causing alerts to be missed and not having visibility into related events that are picked up by different programs.
XDR technology brings each of those independently operating programs to the next level and brings them together and form an alliance. What XDR builds from those individual programs into an allied front to create a united visibility and response to security threats. In the war against cyber threats, we can all agree that allies are a worthy investment. Integration through XDR is bringing your components together to build something with integrity that’s tractable.
After implementing XDR, and with all of your security components working together seamlessly, what can you expect?
An XDR unified security system means real-time and actionable information on which to make decisions. To borrow a term from armed forces intelligence – you’re no longer operating and making decisions from inside the “fog of war”. You have better intel, and that means better and faster decisions and security outcomes. Short story: it means you get down to the business of security faster, leaner, and with satisfied end-users.
When you implement XDR, expect:
- Improved protection, detection, and response to cyber security threats.
- Better productivity of your IT security personnel (which often leads to happier people!)
- Lowered costs
- Better visibility and control of your security platform
What does this look like in an everyday scenario? Your shop may be a team working with resources that are stuck in the detecting and investigation cycles chasing false positives. With XDR, the time from valid detection to triage is reduced and security is extended across endpoints, networks and the cloud. It’s pretty slick, wouldn’t you agree?
Targeted attacks, for example, are triaged faster with the distillation that the XDR approach brings to your now united security components. XDR will even prioritize which threats to respond to first by assigning threat levels to indicate where to send your heavy guns in response. XDR shows your team which incidents are worthy of manual investigation. It can even automate repetitive tasks to boost your team’s productivity. (Did we already mention happier people? That too.)
Detect. Analyze. Prioritize. Take your time back with XDR.