What Is XDR?

XDR provides a comprehensive view of the threat landscape by breaking down silos between security products. This ultimately reduces the time needed to detect and resolve security issues. 

Key capabilities for XDR include: 

• Detecting security incidents

• Automating response capabilities

• Integrating intelligence and telemetry data from multiple sources with security analytics to correlate and contextualize security alerts 

XDR solutions should include a minimum of two native security sensors and integrate seamlessly with your organization’s security ecosystem.

XDR’s primary advantages are:

• Improved, consolidated visibility: Data is ingested from siloed security solutions so that automated analysis can surface findings from large volumes of data that would otherwise depend on slow, manual processes. Solutions typically include a single point of visibility to unify findings in a single console.

• Faster investigations, more productive SecOps teams: Because XDR prioritizes threats and reduces alert volumes with advanced analytics and correlations, teams can focus on the most critical threat events and leverage automation to address known or repeat events.

• Lower total cost of ownership: XDR vendors with a broad set of native capabilities offer cost savings by standardizing on a security stack from a single vendor, which is typically integrated out-of-the-box.  Organizations with a large, best-of-breed environment can unlock data across tools and vendors with XDR solutions that offer open integrations.

XDR holds the promise of consolidating multiple products into a cohesive, unified security incident detection and response system.

Why enterprises need XDR security

Security operations teams (SOCs) need an AI-powered platform that brings together all relevant security data and reveals advanced adversaries. 

Adversaries are using ever-more complex tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to successfully circumvent and exploit traditional security controls. Bad actors such as “lone wolf” attackers, hacking groups, nation states, and even potentially malicious insiders are constantly circling. 

In response, organizations are scrambling to secure growing numbers of vulnerable digital assets both inside and outside the traditional network perimeter. But security professionals are increasingly required to do more with the same or fewer resources, and with strict budget constraints. 

At the same time, enterprise security and risk managers must contend with too many disconnected security tools and data sets from multiple vendors. Security staff struggle with a sea of data that results in alert overload, with too many false positives and little integration of data with analysis tools or incident response.

Enterprises need unified and proactive security measures to defend the entire landscape of technology assets, spanning legacy endpoints, mobile, network, and cloud workloads, without overburdening staff and in-house management resources. This is where the security advantages and productivity value of an XDR solution come in.

How XDR works

XDR ingests, correlates, and contextualizes multiple streams of telemetry. XDR can also analyze TTPs and other threat vectors. This makes complex SecOps capabilities more accessible to security teams that do not have the resources for heavily customized point solutions. 

XDR removes the daunting detection and investigation cycles. It offers threat-centric and business context to move more quickly to a response to a threat.

XDR security provides advanced threat detection and response capabilities, including:

• Detection and response to targeted attacks

• Native support for behavior analysis of users and technology assets

• Threat intelligence, including shared local threat intelligence 

• Reduced need to chase false positives by correlating and confirming alerts automatically

• Integration of relevant data for faster, more accurate incident triage

• Centralized configuration and hardening capability, with weighted guidance to help prioritize activities

• A centralized interface to perform investigations and respond to events

• Playbooks with automation for analysts to establish best practices

• Multivector, multivendor analytics

• Automation and orchestration to streamline many SOC processes

Benefits of XDR

Detecting today’s sophisticated threats requires more than a collection of point solutions.

XDR security provides advanced threat detection and response capabilities including:

• Converting a large stream of alerts into a much smaller number of incidents that can be prioritized for manual investigation

• Providing integrated incident response options that have necessary context from all security components to resolve alerts quickly

• Providing response options that go beyond infrastructure control points—including network, cloud, and endpoints— to deliver comprehensive protection

• Providing automation capabilities for repetitive tasks to improve productivity

• Reducing training and up-leveling Tier 1 support by providing a common management and workflow experience across security components

• Providing usable and high-quality detection content requiring little-to-no tuning

XDR improves critical SOC functions when they are reacting to an attack in their environment:

• Detection
  Identify more and meaningful threats by combining endpoint telemetry with a growing list of security controls providers, as well as security events collected and analyzed by security information and event management (SIEM) systems.

• Investigation
  Human-machine teaming correlates all relevant threat information and applies situational security context to more quickly reduce signal from noise and assist with the identification of root cause.

• Recommendations
  Provide analysts with prescriptive recommendations to further an investigation through additional queries. Offer relevant response actions that would most effectively improve the containment or remediation of a detected risk or threat.

• Hunting
  Provide a common query capability across a data repository containing multivendor sensor telemetry in search of suspicious threat behaviors. This allows threat hunters to locate and take action based on recommendations.

XDR vs. EDR

XDR differs from endpoint detection and response (EDR) in a number of fundamental ways, covering a broader range of security aspects.