Extended Detection and Response (XDR) is a vendor-specific, SaaS-based technology for security threat detection and incident response that “natively combines numerous security products into a cogent security operations system that unifies all licensed components,” according to analyst firm Gartner.
The main benefits of Extended Detection and Response (XDR) are:
- Enhanced capacities for defense, spotting threats and taking action
- Increased operational security personnel productivity
- Monitor dangers across various system components
- Lower total cost of ownership for efficient security threat detection and response
XDR was created as an alternative to point security solutions, which could only do event correlation without a response or were restricted to a single security layer. It is the development of solutions like network traffic analysis and endpoint detection and response (EDR) (NTA).
Here are three of XDR solutions’ most important features.
- Analytics and Detection
- The detection of malevolent insiders, compromised credentials, and external attacks is made possible by the analysis of both internal and external traffic. Even if a danger has already gotten past your system perimeter, XDR is able to detect it by tracking and examining both internal and exterior data.
- Information on well-known attack techniques, tools, sources, and plans across numerous attack vectors is included in integrated threat intelligence. Through the application of threat intelligence, XDR may learn from attacks on other systems and apply that knowledge to identify events that are similar in your environment.
- Machine learning-based detection consists of supervised and semi-supervised techniques that use behavioral baselines to identify hazards. XDR can identify non-traditional threats and zero-day attacks that can get past signature-based defenses thanks to machine learning technologies.
- Investigation and Response
- Tools can automatically combine relevant alerts, create attack timelines from activity logs, and prioritize incidents. Correlation of related alerts and data. Teams can foresee what an attacker would do next thanks to this, which helps them swiftly identify the attack’s primary source.
- Analysts can study events and react to them from the same console thanks to a centralized user interface (UI). This shortens the response time and makes recording responses easier.
- Capabilities for response orchestration enable tool communication as well as direct reaction actions through XDR interfaces. In response to an automatically stopped assault on a single endpoint, for instance, XDR can update endpoint settings across the company.
- Dynamic and Flexible Deployments
- Security orchestration—the capacity to work with and make use of already-in-place controls to deliver unified and uniform responses. In order to ensure that policies and tooling are applied consistently, XDR solutions might additionally contain automated functions.
- Scalable computing and storage—XDR makes advantage of cloud resources that can scale to suit your data processing and analysis requirements. By doing this, historical data that can be used to recognize and look into advanced persistent threats or other ongoing attacks is preserved.
- The integration of machine learning means that solutions improve over time and grow more adept at spotting a wider variety of attacks. This makes it possible to identify and stop the greatest number of attacks, together with the addition of threat intelligence.
For a comprehensive XDR platform to interconnect and correlate detections from alerts across several threat vectors, a vendor must be able to supply a product portfolio and a partner ecosystem with breadth, depth, and market maturity. automatically interpret the situation, rank the risks, and arrive with a solution that can be quickly coordinated across the enterprise.
