What is MXDR (Managed XDR)?

According to an Information Systems Security Association and Enterprise Strategy Group ESG report, the cybersecurity skills crisis continues up to its fifth year and it is perpetuated by the lack of business investments. Unfilled job vacancies, high staff burnout rates, and increasing workloads for security teams are the top ramifications of talent shortages. Businesses are not investing in people enough and there is a need to employ cutting-edge security technologies that align with business goals and client requirements. CISOs understand that good cyber security involves managing people, processes, and technologies. This is where Managed XDR Solutions come in.

There are many MXDR vendors in the market and organizations have the option to outsource XDR management as well. Managed XDR empowers businesses with teams of specialized experts and solves common challenges in Security Operations Centers (SOCs). MXDR solutions address concerns with complex setups, lack of infrastructure visibility, alert fatigue, and cover other various security aspects. Let’s explore how they can help your business and why you should consider them.

What is MXDR (Managed XDR)?

Managed XDR platforms focus on proactively identifying, classifying, and neutralizing potential threats before they escalate and transform into serious security issues. MXDR solutions are supported by firewalls, comprehensive forensic analysis capabilities, threat intelligence, and other incident remediation measures. MXDR tools enable security teams to effectively triage, investigate incidents, and mitigate them in real-time. They provide 24/7 threat monitoring and combine cutting-edge technologies with human insights for the best protection. MXDR solutions can track down the origin points of attacks and are managed by the direct support and intelligence of service providers.

Features of MXDR

Managed XDR or MXDR provides advanced threat detection and security orchestration features to clients. They are as follows:

1. AI-Powered Analytics – MXDR leverages state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to detect advanced threats. It prevents zero-day attacks, fileless malware, and other types of intrusions.
2. Real-Time Threat Monitoring – MXDR monitors network traffic in real time to identify potential threats, including endpoint activities and cloud-based applications.
3. Incident Response – MXDR offers advanced incident response and threat containment capabilities to organizations. It offers automated quarantining, eradication, and remediation of various threats upon identification and detection.
4. Threat Intelligence – MXDR builds threat intelligence feeds by ingesting data from multiple sources. Threat intelligence models also include open-source intelligence, internal threat intelligence, and commercial feeds.
5. Seamless Integrations – MXDR services can integrate flawlessly with other security tools such as firewalls, endpoint security systems, and intrusion detection systems (IDS). Its security orchestration capabilities include automated workflows to streamline incident response and reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR). MXDR services can also seamlessly integrate with IoT-specific threat detection solutions and cloud security services.
6. Customizable Dashboards – MXDR offers customizable dashboards that give security teams real-time views of incident response status, threat data analytics, and overall security posture. These dashboards also generate compliance reports for various standards and regulatory requirements such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR, etc.

When Should You Consider MXDR for Businesses?

Choosing an MXDR solution can significantly enhance your organization’s cyber security posture. You can consider XDR for business when you need to hire specialized expertise in digital forensics and investigation. An MXDR solution is great for reducing alert fatigue and identifying potential attackers before they have a chance to infiltrate environments. They help streamline communication between customers and security teams and provide complete accountability of threat detection outcomes.

You can consider MXDR when you need to prioritize ongoing security training and expertise. It is a service that will help your team stay up-to-date with the latest threats, certifications, and industry knowledge. MXDR is also an excellent choice to consider if you want to track regular security progress, furnish threat reports, and outline controls. It ensures continuous regulatory compliance throughout the detection and response processes. When security teams require enhanced visibility into workflows and focus on increasing operational efficiency, MXDR is great to consider for acquiring a competitive edge.

MXDR vs XDR vs MDR

XDR is a security product designed to help security experts mitigate threats either in-house or managed. MDR is a security service that comprises outside teams that leverage tools like XDR technologies to enhance incident response efforts.

Below are the key differences between MXDR vs XDR vs MDR:

How Managed XDR (MXDR) Works?

Managed XDR (MXDR) services work in the following ways:

1. Telemetry data collection – The full IT ecosystem is analyzed and telemetry data is ingested from different sources: cloud, endpoints, networks, firewalls, and identities.
2. Threat intelligence modeling – Clusters are formed by grouping similar or relevant security events. Threat intelligence models are made to provide more holistic views, with business context added for further analysis.
3. Threat hunting and investigation –  Security experts use a combination of tools and procedures to bypass detection protocols. The scope for vulnerabilities and identify weaknesses commonly exploited by cybercriminals. The investigation process involves analyzing the scope of attacks, their severity, and deciding sequential steps for remediation.
4. Threat remediation – Analysts isolate impacted systems and quarantine threats. They prevent the attack from spreading, remove malware, and contain infected files.
5. Neutralization – After identifying the root causes of these threats, they begin to neutralize them and implement measures to prevent future recurrence.

Capabilities of MXDR

Businesses can boost cyber resilience and build a robust security architecture by employing MXDR services. MXDR services drive the prevention, detection, remediation, and response of various IT, OT, and IoT threats. In today’s world of accelerated digital transformation and the emergence of sophisticated threats, traditional “prevent and detect ” security strategies aren’t enough to protect organizations. Businesses need to adapt faster, be more responsive, and stop attacks in their tracks, even preventing them before they happen.

MXDR services can give insights into their current security architecture, highlight security oversights, and enhance innovation. It can reduce the total cost of ownership for businesses and provide substantial returns on their investment.

Below are the following capabilities of MXDR services:

1. Enhanced productivity – MXDR services reduce organizational security workloads, streamline workflows, and enhance operational efficiency. They supercharge team productivity, build multi-tier cyber threat intelligence, and deliver powerful user experiences.
2. Continuous innovation – MXDR redefines what it means to work with people, technology, and processes. It takes an adaptive approach and co-creates value-led innovation with clients. As threats become more sophisticated, MXDR helps organizations stay Agile, vigilant, and keep up. MXDR solutions are designed to scale up or down with organizational requirements, thus providing complete flexibility.
3. Automated response and proactive threat hunting – MXDR protects businesses by applying zero-trust security principles and defends their entire digital core. It helps them define their cyber security business strategy, risk mitigation, and policy management and enhances regulatory compliance.
4. Increased visibility and swift incident response – Organizations can pressure test defenses, understand, and prepare for emerging threats. Companies can get unmatched visibility into cyber threats and enjoy 24X7 end-to-end cyber threat detection and hunting, response, and analytics – all automated. The best part is that a security team oversees how these tools and features are implemented, so any oversights that can stem from a lack of human intervention or human error are automatically addressed.

Managed XDR (MXDR) Benefits

Here are the main benefits you get from using Managed XDR services within organizations:

1. Holistic security – MXDR solutions look at security as a whole and fortify complete IT environments. They include endpoints, networks, cloud services, and IoT devices. The integration of real-time threat intelligence further enhances the detection of emerging threats.
2. Unified Security Operations Center (SOC) – You centralize and consolidate your security efforts by leveraging MXDR solutions. They automate response actions, boost organizational efficiency, and make it easier to collaborate or coordinate with teams on various efforts.
3. Real-time surveillance – MDXR provides constant observation of network traffic, endpoints, and cloud environments. It detects anomalies, suspicious behaviors, and provides the best options for mitigating them. MDXR aggregates data from multiple sources for comprehensive data collection and analysis.
4. Attack-based defense – One of the main benefits of MXDR is how it analyzes threats from an attacker’s perspective. It understands tactics and procedures used by hackers, identifies security loopholes, blindspots, and addresses them. Additionally, it adds contextual awareness to alerts which helps in responding to and prioritizing threats effectively.
5. Predictive analytics – MXDR is a great way to forecast security incidents by analyzing threat trends and leveraging user entity and behavior analytics. These services identify unusual activities like new accounts, shadow IDs, and unexpected login and log-out session times. Any historical data collected is used to predict future attacks and enable proactive defense measures to combat them.
6. Powered by security professionals – MXDR has the added benefit of the human element combined with AI-driven cyber security. It brings the best of both worlds and spots hidden and unknown threats. By relying on these expert security services, you can reduce email attacks, prevent business compromise, and weed out insider threats. MXDR experts proactively hunt for software vulnerabilities, patches, and improve your overall business security posture. These experts are available round-the-clock and always on the lookout for your organization.

MXDR Use Cases

MXDR is the future of cyber security; it offers multiple use cases across various industry domains:

1. Integrated Security Orchestration

Modern organizations employ different security solutions for the best results. MXDR integrates security orchestration across different systems and adapts to the ever-changing threat landscape. It uses Machine Learning (ML) to analyze data, detect anomalies, and spot indicators of compromise (IOC). MXDR’s automated threat-hunting capabilities make it ideal for increasing the speed and effectiveness of an organization’s incident response strategy and planning.

Security orchestration includes centralized logging, auditing, reporting, and analysis, all of which are essential for maintaining network security.

2. Threat Intelligence Enhancement

MXDR platforms can enhance threat intelligence by incorporating global intelligence. The amalgamation of multiple threat intelligence sources allows organizations to deal with advanced persistent threats (APTs) and targeted attacks. MXDR helps experts identify attacks before they happen, being several steps ahead of their execution.

Why SentinelOne for MXDR?

SentinelOne Vigilance Respond is a 24/7/365 Managed Detection & Response (MXDR) service that empowers organizations to defend against emerging threats. Overextended security teams need a global MDR service to accelerate their incident response and investigation capabilities.

MXDR delegates threat monitoring, review, and triage to a global team of in-house security experts and emphasizes on aligning with the best strategic business initiatives.

SentinelOne for MXDR uses machine-speed technology run by dedicated analysts to deliver the following services:

• SOC team augmentation – Offload day-to-day operations and speed up threat hunting and response times. Let your team refocus on program strategy and get follow-the-sun coverage no matter where you are in the world.
• Storyline™ technology – Vigilance adds human context to Storyline™ technology to and helps achieve complete visibility into an organization’s infrastructure. Analysts prioritize and triage based on the unique needs of your security program.
• Documentation and reporting – Every identified threat in your environment is reviewed. MXDR assigns the right priority levels to threats and mitigates them in that order. It improves ongoing reporting cadence and explains where the organization went wrong. Analysts leverage rich endpoint telemetry and investigate each threat individually.
• Shorter MTTD & MTTR – Vigilance is one of the fastest MDR services in the market and has a 30-minute mean time to respond, thus giving organizations plenty of time to prepare for growing threats.

Conclusion

MXDR represents a growing need for more comprehensive security solutions in the cybersecurity landscape. For now, it is providing extensive threat monitoring capabilities combined with human expertise. MXDR covers all attack surfaces and ensures robust protection of all digital assets. It is laying the groundwork for endpoint and cloud security as more and more organizations understand how to use it and mitigate threats accordingly.

MXDR FAQs

1. What is Managed XDR?

Managed XDR is an advanced threat detection service run by a team of world-class security professionals. It uses a combination of the latest digital technologies and outsources human-led expertise. MXDR enables robust data collection and correlation capabilities. It provides cyber protection across emails, cloud servers, and networks. MXDR automates some aspects of threat response and remediation. It enables 24/7 monitoring, investigation, detection, and risk prioritization.

2. What security threats does MXDR identify?

Managed XDR services can identify:

• Fileless malware, trojans, and other types of malicious software
• Phishing and ransomware attacks
• Insider threats, especially unauthorized data access and data exfiltration
• Compromised devices, Command and Control (C2) Communications, and lateral movements within organizational networks
• Unusual network activity, unusual system behaviors, and unauthorized encryption of sensitive data

Some other threats MXDR can identify are – botnet attacks, spyware, Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks, keyloggers, backdoors, adware, rootkits, viruses, logic bombs, data breaches, and crypto-jacking instances.

3. What business challenges does MXDR solve?

MXDR solves many business challenges such as:

• It enables organizations to enjoy swift incident response capabilities.
• It provides great compliance management and auditing capabilities
• MXDR provides real-time visibility into security events and reduces false positives by using advanced machine learning analytics and AI
• It minimizes the impact on business operations and ensures the continuity of various services during data breaches.