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What Is Extended Detection and Response (XDR)?

What Is Extended Detection and Response (XDR)?

Extended Detection and Response (XDR) provides greater transparency into networks, endpoints, applications, and clouds while utilizing analytics and automation technology to detect and defend against cyber security threats.

What makes Extended Detection and Response (XDR) novel as a security solution is that it delivers end-to-end visibility with detection across multiple security layers. The architecture of XDR incorporates a complex federation of security signals along with next-level behavioral and cross-correlated analytics that depend upon an automated closed-loop response system. The result is a uniquely unified user experience that provides a proactive and holistic approach to cyber security protection against today’s most advanced threat actors.

Experts generally agree that XDR is a promising solution poised to transform security operations centers (SOCs), both in terms of scale and efficiency. The wide adoption of XDR is steadily increasing as more and more industry leaders realize how effective the technology is in providing their organizations with robust cyber security protection.

What is XDR (Extended Detection and Response)?

XDR gathers and correlates data across email, networks, endpoints, applications, and clouds to enable visibility and give context to potential advanced threats. Extended Detection and Response allow users to analyze these threats and set priorities on them according to their potential impact.

This enhanced visibility helps ns to work from the top down as they work to detect and mitigate irregularities along multiple security layers to ultimately prevent incidents of data loss and other security breaches.

As an open-source standard, XDR helps move the cybersecurity industry away from expensive and inefficient “rip and replace” applications. XDR’s open-source characteristics present companies with a more cost-effect alternative so they can thereby maximize the value of their security investments.

XDR solutions integrate more automation for analytics, detection, investigation, and threat response. Automation significantly reduced the meantime to detect (MTTD) while hastening the meantime to recovery (MTTR). By increasing the efficiency of those metrics, the cost of mitigating a data breach is inherently reduced. Companies realize savings elsewhere, too, such as labor expenditures because their analysts are no longer tied up in complicated investigation activities.

The biggest advantage to XDR over previous cybersecurity solutions is that it is an integrated suite of security products. XDR offers a holistic and unified insight into threat activity, simplifying search and investigate processes with automated threat intelligence features and enhanced domain expertise to prevent threats across multiple vectors.

The following is a summary of primary advantages to the XDR platform:

  • Better overall protection and response performance
  • Improved productivity of cyber security personnel
  • Low cost of entry and ownership compared with other platforms
  • Why should businesses adopt XDR cyber security solutions?

All security operations centers benefit from a platform that integrates relevant security data and exposes potential threats under one umbrella. As threat actors adopt more complex strategies, techniques, and procedures, security professionals must develop new approaches to circumvent and thwart them.

Criminal hackers are relentless and traditional security controls are being exposed in record numbers and companies the world over are scrambling to secure their valued digital assets. With an increasing supply of employees working from home, cyber security teams find themselves precipitously strained to defend against a seemingly endless stream of attacks. This is where well-integrated and automated security solutions like XDR come into play.

Businesses don’t want their security personally in a position of doing more with fewer resources, especially under the current market conditions in which costs are rising and budgets are slim. XDR offers a unified and proactive cyber security solution to defend against a rapidly shifting landscape of technology and threats without having to overburden valued on-premises IT staff and management resources.

In the present business milieu, threat actors assail companies from all sides and present in several forms. Criminal hacking groups, nation-states, “lone wolf” attackers, and disgruntled insiders each account for the miasma of potential threat actors security professionals and risk managers face every day. Not to mention the vast amount of data that frequently produce false positives, placing cyber security teams at historic risk for operational stress.

Here are just a few additional benefits and advanced protection capabilities of XDR security:

  • Automated detection and response to targeted attack
  • Local and externally acquired threat intelligence capabilities
  • Native support for behavior analysis that addresses both users and digital assets
  • Less false positives along with the human-led investigations to correlate them
  • Fast integration of relevant data across several security layers
  • Threat and security prioritization functions
  • Robust cross-correlated analytics
  • Partner with PCH Technologies for your XDR cyber security solutions

PCH Technologies, a managed IT service provider in New Jersey, works with businesses in the financial service, transportation, and government sector. If you’re considering adopting XDR cyber security solutions to your security operations center, call (856) 754-7500 can leverage this platform to help your company cut costs and boost productivity.