How to get the most out of XDR

Extended Detection and Response (XDR) has recently attracted a lot of attention from security practitioners, analysts, and the vendor community. According to the Gartner Hype Cycle TM for Security Operations, 2022, XDR is at the top of market interest and promises to provide significant security visibility and threat response improvements.

XDR promises to reduce complexity and costs while improving incident response and remediation and increasing productivity.

And while many companies are interested in adopting XDR, what should organizations consider as they examine the growing number of solutions on the market? Here are three key takeaways to help you prioritize XDR adoption.

Start with an XDR solution with roots in EDR

The most efficient way to implement a strong XDR strategy is to replicate what works with EDR to other attack surfaces in your organization. An XDR built on a solid EDR foundation brings many benefits such as: B. the ability to draw on the EDR’s high-fidelity telemetry to provide critical supporting data from endpoints, as well as real-time detection and remediation capabilities.

XDR goes beyond endpoint protection to provide detection and response coverage across the enterprise. That means it provides more transparency and more context on threats. The high-fidelity telemetry that makes EDR so valuable and provides important supporting data from endpoints is now available from more sources.

Good EDRs provide real-time behavior detection and remediation that can be deployed more broadly across the enterprise with XDR. Alerts that might otherwise have been missed early on can now be identified and remedied earlier, before they have a significant impact. And it’s easier to get a broader understanding of what’s going on across enterprise security.

Choose an XDR that increases SecOps efficiency

It’s good to go for an XDR solution that increases the efficiency of SecOps with various built-in integrations that expand functionality and ease the burden on taxed security teams.

Cybersecurity analysts are already overwhelmed, and the situation is likely to get worse as threats proliferate, tools proliferate, and skill shortages continue to negatively impact security researcher efficiency. That’s why it’s important to have a tool that automatically correlates related activities with unified alerts, dramatically simplifying the task for analysts. Central to the above points is automation. Maximizing the value of your existing tools and freeing up the SOC team is crucial. Automation can improve threat detection, triage, and response.

The solution should demonstrate the ability to reduce SOC stress by leveraging machine speed to correlate and contextualize a large number of alerts. Ultimately, fewer notifications, fewer clicks, and fewer screens mean higher SOC efficiency.

Invest in an XDR that maximizes existing security investments

A strong XDR solution helps maximize the value of your security investments. While a closed XDR requires the vendor to provide all necessary sensors for typical use cases, an open XDR focuses on backend analytics and workflows and integrates with the organization’s existing security controls.

This makes sense because many organizations have tools and technologies in their SOC that would be wasteful to simply decommission. These best-in-breed technologies provide point solution coverage and each come with a steep learning curve and operational burden for SecOps efficiency. If you swap these out for a new tool, you simply start another learning curve with a new burden. With XDR, you can leverage these existing tools and connect them through simple built-in integrations.

The right solution makes it easy to add integrations to third-party systems such as SIEM or SOAR solutions with just a few clicks. Email, identity management systems, cloud services and other third-party systems can all be brought into the XDR system, which is a huge improvement over having to secure each one individually and use a different dashboard to manage alerts. These integrations can then be enabled and automated without writing complex code.

A strong XDR extends the powerful capability to the entire connected ecosystem of security tools across the enterprise. Automated response actions now extend to third-party applications. For example, you can enforce advanced authentication in your identity management tools when the system detects suspicious behavior. Users are then prompted to submit additional authentication forms. And you can automatically block email or web connections for suspicious resources or users based on predefined rules and triggers.

Automated one-click replies are designed to reduce adversary dwell time and quickly contain threats.

Thinking outside the box to achieve measurable results

When choosing an XDR, you need to think outside the box and focus on what really matters:

The results it can deliver. Identifying KPIs not only helps determine the effectiveness of tools and processes, but also communicates that effectiveness to leadership and the board of directors.

XDR can improve overall KPIs due to its faster, deeper, and more effective threat detection and response than separate, disparate tools such as EDR and SIEM. Using a wider range of sources means that XDR can improve mean time to detection (MTTD). XDR’s single source of information and easier-to-manage alert load help reduce Mean Time to Investigate (MTTI) by accelerating triage and reducing investigation time and scope. XDR’s simple, fast, and relevant automation reduces mean time to response (MTTR) by enabling simple, fast, and relevant automations to quickly contain threats.

Of course, the Executive Board is not only concerned with the effectiveness of cybersecurity measures. Your members also have budgets to worry about. So XDR’s ability to reduce total cost of ownership is welcome. AI and automation mean security analysts are under less strain, which means they can be more efficient and productive.

While it can sometimes be difficult to know how much a security tool or platform matters, XDR offers clear, measurable benefits. It helps reduce costs, increase efficiency and improve transparency across the cybersecurity space.

parting thoughts

The world of cybersecurity is ever-changing and it is often wise to be skeptical about new trends. However, XDR is more than a new trend. It’s a new way of thinking about security – a platform that can be deployed to prepare an organization for today’s challenges in the ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape. It is an integral part of the future of the modern SOC.

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