XDR Extended Detection & Response
Alert aggregation, data analytics, and automated threat detection and response to simplify security.
Introduction
The cyber threat landscape is rapidly evolving and expanding. In response, many organisations 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 organisation 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 security, XDR enables an organisation to proactively protect itself against cyber threats by providing unified visibility across multiple attack vectors.
Unified and integrated data visibility
Most organisations 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 organisation’s assets. Unification enables an organisation’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 contextualised “incident”.
By simplifying security down to a single platform and dashboard, XDR enables a security team to effectively secure an organisation 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.
Our security engineers and XDR experts are here to guide you on your journey to XDR. Together with you we will create a dedicated team and develop a plan to ensure XDR success. Thanks to our close relationships with leading technology vendors, we are able to design and build the best solution and create a XDR road map for your organisation.
Why choose SR Cloud Solutions?
SR Cloud Solutions has a 25-year track record of supplying managed security services to many organizations in different industries.
- The best technology – highest levels of accreditation with the world’s leading vendors such as Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto.
- Skills and expertise with a UK-based 24/7 Security Operations Centre (SOC).
- We are a Joscar accredited business which means we are certified to work with leading defense companies who require the highest standards of cyber security.
- We are experts in Cloud infrastructures such as Microsoft Azure so we can provide expert security consultancy on hybrid cloud environments and how best to secure and monitor those environments including Cloud Governance.
BENEFITS of an xdr solution
Integrated visibility
Rapid time to value
Lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
Single pane of glass management
Improved productivity
Analyst support
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is XDR?
An incredibly simplified way of thinking about XDR is that it is EDR++.
A more complex (but accurate) way of thinking about XDR is …
There are tools on the market today that take traditional approaches to security operations: ingesting data from across the environment and performing security analytics on top of it. In contrast, there’s a set of tools on the market today that are innovating to provide a different approach: performing detections based on where the data is.
This has been the point of view of endpoint detection and response (EDR) vendors since inception — that the location of the data (on the endpoint) can provide the highest efficacy telemetry source for detection and response. It started with the endpoint — thus, EDR was born. It must, however, now encompass other aspects as data shifts from being located on-premises to the cloud. This is the first motion leading EDR vendors to evolve to XDR — to identify and protect where the data moves next.
There’s also a second motion leading EDR vendors to evolve to XDR …
EDR is a market-validated tool for effective endpoint detection and response, but incident responders need more telemetry than the endpoint alone: network, email, and applications. In an effort to address this, security teams have used security analytics platforms to match endpoint telemetry with telemetry from other parts of the environment to varying degrees of success. Some solutions, however, have suffered from high resource consumption, high rates of false positives, and large data volumes, creating their own big data challenges.
XDR looks to address this by taking a different approach to detection and response, which continues to be anchored to the endpoint and other high-efficacy telemetry sources but correlates endpoint detections with telemetry from other sources to simplify investigation and response.
What Does XDR Replace In The SOC?
XDR replaces EDR in the security operations center (SOC). That is the simplest way to put it. It may eventually replace the SIEM, but that is a five-year vision at this point more than anything else.
Does XDR Need SOAR?
XDR does not need SOAR; if anything, buying SOAR on top of XDR to fulfill the response capabilities in XDR is redundant. One of the things that’s important about XDR is that it is not meant to mash together existing security analytics technology in order to form some magically better technology. It is meant to focus on optimization through automation based in EDR technology to improve the incident response process without relying on the crutches normally associated with rules and playbooks.