Cyberattacks have become a new normal. Cybersecurity concepts like endpoint detection and response (EDR) have therefore become essential in ensuring the security of endpoints like laptops, desktops, and mobile devices. But if the number of devices increases across your organization, endpoint security may not be enough. You need to secure not just the endpoints but also your end-to-end network and other vulnerable communication methods like email.
So, what more you can add to your cybersecurity arsenal? You need to evolve your EDR cybersecurity solution into XDR (extended detection and response), which brings an integrated and automated approach to threat detection, investigation, and response for the whole environment.
In this post, we’ll take a look at what XDR means, why should you replace EDR with XDR, and the benefits of XDR.
What Is XDR?
XDR is an emerging technology that provides robust threat detection, response, and investigation capabilities for all endpoints. It coordinates an organization’s security efforts across its entire cloud estate.
XDR consolidates various security tools and layers, including endpoints, email, applications, and networks.
It can take in huge volumes of raw data from across multiple sources, connect insights, and provide deeper endpoint visibility after careful analysis. It frees up time for security analysts by handling repetitive tasks and removes malicious processes. It can automatically send alerts and create suspicious behavior profiles for various potential threats.
An XDR solution will use AI and Machine Learning to become more adaptive, improve awareness, and deal with the latest threats. It serves as a sequel to traditional EDR and extends the capabilities of EDR and MDR services combined.
Why is XDR better than EDR?
XDR solutions are easily scalable compared to traditional EDR security tools.
Where EDR tools provide only endpoint detection and protection, XDR gives you an upgrade by going beyond endpoints into network, application, and cloud security. Unlike EDR, XDR gives you detailed data and visibility about each endpoint such as network connections, file changes, and process activities. XDR can flag security alerts for analyst reviews and auto-heal affected assets quickly.
EDR delivers a unified view of security threats; it is limited to endpoint threat detection and response management.
Why Do We Need XDR?
We need XDR to achieve cross-layer visibility throughout the infrastructure.
XDR allows us to better understand threats and adds business context.
As your infrastructure evolves, so does the need to protect it from various cyber-attacks. A minor flaw can take your whole organization down.
It’s vital to deploy XDR to reduce or eliminate the following security risks:
- Unauthorized access to restricted zones
- Noncompliance with upcoming cyber security regulations
- Lack of regular patching or updates
- Malicious insider attacks and social engineering
- DDoS, brute force invasions, identity theft, and more
Benefits of XDR
The technology helps you eliminate various security risks. Here are the top XDR benefits:
#1. Comprehensive Threat Detection
The first benefit you get from XDR is enhanced threat detection and prevention. Since XDR covers more than just an endpoint, it provides you with a centralized monitoring platform. The platform aggregates data from multiple security tools and systems, such as endpoint security, network traffic, mail, software, and cloud environments.
Using the consolidated data, XDR allows you to easily and effectively identify and respond to all types of threats. By combining AI and ML, you can proactively mitigate any suspicious activity or potential threat before it causes harm to systems.
#2. Analysis of Internal and External Traffic
Centralized monitoring provides holistic views that go beyond just a single endpoint; XDR analyzes network traffic flows, including cloud-based environments.
XDR covers all attack surfaces present within the organization. It includes both external and internal traffic monitoring that attackers may exploit to compromise systems.
#3. Improved Visibility and Insight
XDR solutions underly unified data aggregation, giving you better visibility and insight into any threats or weak points in your infrastructure. Once you know what the weak points are, you can fix them quickly or set alerts in case an invader tries to exploit them.
Furthermore, XDR enhances the capability of security officials involved in cyber forensics and reporting. They get a complete overview of threats that help in the investigation process of attacks that occurred on the system.
#4. Enhanced Incident Response
XDR’s automated incident response workflows will enable you to respond to threats faster. The remediation times are cut short. You get adequate threat detection coverage and it provides rapid incident response.
XDR tools automatically prioritize critical incidents and provide real-time alerts. Its automated workflows execute predefined actions that quickly isolate threats to reduce their impact until security teams take necessary action.
In case one of your systems gets compromised, XDR tools disrupt the attack chain and reduce its overall impact; it separates compromised assets through automatic attack disruption—for example, by automatically disabling compromised user accounts; it can also block incoming and outgoing communications for suspected devices.
#5. Cost Efficiency
Since XDR contains a package of security solutions for your entire infrastructure, it saves you the cost of buying any overlapping or extra security tools. Additionally, it lowers operational costs with its comprehensive threat detection and automated incident response services.
Rapid restoration services save customers from data outages, losses, and additional expenses associated with requesting outside support services.
#6. Continuous Business Operations
One of the downsides of a cyberattack is business disruption. And if business is disrupted regularly, users lose trust in the system and may use the service less.
XDR ensures business continues running smoothly by quickly restoring the service in case of a cyberattack or global outage. So, along with financial gain, you get user trust and reputational gain by implementing XDR.
#7. Seamless Integration
XDR in itself is scalable and flexible enough to integrate with existing security tools. It’s also compatible with multi-platform environments. Combining XDR with different security solutions further expands the capability of threat detection to address cyber threats.
Integrating XDR can also increase your response capability by streamlining and automating security operations.
#8. Better Management of Threat Alerts
Having multiple cybersecurity solutions can pile up false-positive threat alerts, leading to alert fatigue and performance degradation. You might waste time investigating false alarms, miss important alerts, and even become desensitized to legitimate ones.
XDR uses AI to reduce reliance on human resources. It reduces the number of false positive alerts and generates an alarm only when it finds real danger.
#9. Account Compromise and Insider Threats
Social engineering is one attack method where hackers don’t directly attack the network. Instead, they target people, like company employees, to extract sensitive information from them. They use collected intel to compromise the organization’s security. Sometimes, employees make deliberate attempts to leak information.
XDR analyzes the user activities of those who are logged into systems. For suspicious activity patterns like odd login times or access from unusual locations, XDR issues account compromise alerts.
These tools also alert security teams whenever insider attempts are made by tracking data movements and looking for signs of exfiltration.
How SentinelOne Can Help?
SentinelOne offers two products that bring your organization the benefits of XDR technology: Singularity™ XDR AI Platform and Singularity™ XDR.
Singularity™ XDR AI Platform is our complete enterprise-scale security solution. It enables unfettered visibility, industry-leading detection, and autonomous response. Singularity™ XDR sharpens threat detection and response across your entire security stack.
Here are the core features offered by each:
- Zero missed detections, zero configuration changes, 100% visibility
- #1 in real-world protection, and record-breaking ATT&CK Evaluation
- Powered by Purple AI which is your personal Gen AI cyber security analyst
- Ingests data from any source for analysis, backed by Singularity™ Data Lake
- Protects your cloud-native data, applications, identities, and services
- Rapid threat hunting with Storylines
- Provides hybrid cloud protection and secures VMs, containers, Kubernetes clusters, on-premise data centers, and public and private cloud assets
Singularity Identity™ protects your identity infrastructure and credentials
Conclusion
XDR is a step up from EDR + MDR and traditional cyber security. It offers improved visibility, advanced threat detection, and reduced false positives. For any organization that is serious about maintaining a holistic view of their security, XDR can support them in their endeavors.
Your users also get end-to-end visibility into their account usage and can flag misuse.
SentinelOne Singularity™ XDR fortifies your cyber defenses and extends protection from the endpoint to beyond. It empowers you with unfettered visibility into your cloud estate and speeds up investigations. If you’d like to enhance your remediation efforts and get results, try Singularity™ XDR.
You can book a free live demo with us here.
FAQs
The top XDR benefits for enterprises are:
- Advanced threat detection
- Analysis of internal and external traffic
- Improved visibility and insight
- Enhanced incident response
- Cost reduction
- Uninterrupted business operations
- Seamless integrations
- Better management of threat alerts
- No account compromises or insider threats
- Continuous regulatory compliance
The benefits of XDR when using Singularity™ XDR are:
- Sharpened threat detection and response
- Unrivaled response speeds and efficiency
- Contextual Threat intelligence and smarter Workflows
- Single console to monitor and analyze data from all sources
- Patented Storylines technology that reconstructs attacks in real-time
- 24/7, all-year reliable coverage
Compared to EDR, which is limited to endpoint security, XDR goes beyond endpoints. It secures the entire organization‘s infrastructure, including networks, applications, and cloud systems. Even automated incident response works across multiple security domains for XDR compared to only the endpoint for EDR.
The key objectives of XDR are as follows;
- It collects and correlates data from multiple security layers
- XDR secures the entire infrastructure, including networks, endpoints, and cloud
- Gives better visibility of threats or weak points through a unified data console
- Automate incident response to reduce the impact of attacks
- Reduces the number of false positive alerts