Does Your Business Need XDR?

You want to have every email and digital corner of your office secure against hackers. You know this prevents expensive data breaches and cuts long downtimes following a cyber attack.

As a mid-sized company or an enterprise with security teams, you also want your cyber professionals to stay productive — help them focus on the most pressing security issues and not be distracted by irrelevant side tasks.

To remain robust, security has to be continually managed and updated.

With all the threats that are out there, threatening the security of your business, what should you focus on first? How can you pinpoint your most critical weaknesses?

This is where sophisticated data analysis and comprehensive security reports make all the difference.

To make sense of a large quantity of data that is coming from security tools (and needs to be analyzed), modern companies rely on Extended Detection and Response — also known as XDR.

Could your business also benefit from an XDR solution?

Let’s go over the main features of the tool and break down how it can help analysts continually improve security with relevant data.

A Short Walkthrough of XDR Capabilities

Extended Detection and Response (XDR) is capable of:

• Gathering data from all the security tools you have
• Using AI to analyze that data and detect threats early
• Uniting the most important alerts in a single interface
• Automating response to known threats

What does that mean for teams and the cyber defense of your company?

These key XDR features solve one of the major challenges cybersecurity had for decades — tracking and analyzing large volumes of data that are arriving from siloed security tools.

Improving Data Analysis With Correlation

Businesses collect and create a lot of data. In cybersecurity, most of the data comes from the security solutions that the company has to defend its infrastructure. To be useful, all of the incoming data has to be continually organized and analyzed.

Before XDR, companies would rely on SIEM to do so. It would also collect and analyze the data from security tools. However, it would present too many alerts — many of them not representing the most critical flaws.

XDR also provides the business with alerts and insights based on the data that is continually coming from versatile security solutions. The main difference is in its approach to the analysis of data.

It combines Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning to gather and correlate big data. This means that it keeps learning about the company and considers the unique context of the infrastructure during analysis.

As a result, security teams get only alerts that are relevant to the company — instead of being overwhelmed by insights that are leading them on a wild goose chase.

Reintroducing Visibility Into Versatile Attack Vectors

Cybercriminals can use attack vectors to get their foot into your infrastructure. Think phishing emails, vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit (and that the company is unaware of), or malware that has already infected the device.

Within the security operation center, teams must track alerts from siloed security solutions. They also have to monitor the entire infrastructure that is continually scaling and changing.

How does XDR improve visibility?

Besides considering the context of the company, XDR also presents the most critical insights in a single dashboard. Uniting the reports is an alternative to facing alert fatigue caused by having to switch between different dashboards.

With XDR, one dashboard is enough for teams to gain insights into the state of security of the entire infrastructure.

With it, they gain a bird’s eye view into the complete infrastructure — have a single point from which they can see the latest findings about possible attacks and vulnerabilities.

Automating Threat Blocking and Mitigation

Businesses are facing a lot of cyber threats. Most of them will be blocked by security tools you do have because the majority of attacks aren’t sophisticated — meaning they aren’t likely to bypass the security tools.

For companies with security teams, having the XDR means that they can rely on the automated detection and response of well-known threats. And further automate new types of attacks that are discovered later.

Automation is not only essential for scaling security but also for streamlining the workflow of teams. It reduces the number of repetitive tasks and frees up their time to focus more energy on advanced threats.

For example, sophisticated hacking usually requires manual response from the teams. These are the hacking exploits where a skilled threat actor has been looking for a vulnerability they can use to get into the company for days or even months.

Could Your Business Benefit From XDR Solution?

Once your business becomes mid-sized and you form a group of security professionals, your company can benefit from Extended Detection and Response.

As you scale and hackers deploy more attacks (many of them exploiting yet unknown flaws), you need more cybersecurity tools as well as more sophisticated tools to make sense of the influx of data they generate.

Therefore, with all the cyber solutions that already protect your company, the missing piece of the puzzle your team needs to see the whole picture is XDR.

For cyber analysts, this means all the relevant data is presented in a single dashboard. Critical threats within the company are prioritized using AI and machine learning.

Teams can quickly react to more advanced threats and mitigate the most critical issues — helping your business avoid expensive cyber incidents.