The cybersecurity industry’s evolution from perimeter protection to holistic visibility, detection, and response is perhaps best illustrated in the evolution from endpoint protection platforms (EPP) to comprehensive security solutions that provide holistic protection for an organization’s ever-expanding attack surface, including network, cloud, and identity.
Extended detection and response (XDR) is one of those solutions. Over the past few years, XDR has gained momentum and there’s no signs of it slowing down. According to the June 2024 Gartner Market Guide for Extended Detection and Response, “by year-end 2028, XDR will be deployed in 30% of end-user organizations to reduce the number of security vendors they have in place.”
But XDR isn’t the only detection and response solution aimed at holistically protecting an organization’s entire environment. With so many solutions on the market and the dynamic nature of both cybersecurity and organizations’ operational needs, it’s important to look at what XDR is, what it isn’t, and if it’s the best option for your IT environment.
What Is XDR?
XDR is a tool, often anchored to an EDR tool, that is designed to correlate signals from different sources and provide extended response beyond the endpoint. This common anchoring to the endpoint means that, while XDR can apply detections beyond a single source and move beyond siloed detection and response, the major focus of the XDR is often integration with an endpoint solution like endpoint detection and response (EDR) or endpoint protection platforms (EPP).
XDR can reduce the number of false alerts a security team receives and provide multiple response actions for true positives. Also, by consolidating telemetry from multiple sources into a single, central console, three alerts from three separate tools becomes a single, consolidated alert with clearer context. By offering a more complete picture of security incidents in an organization’s attack surface, customers gain layered visibility and greater threat detection and analysis capabilities.
Simply put, XDR enables in-house security teams to identify threats, connect the dots across different security tools, gain improved response time through automation, and investigate alerts across multiple system components.
XDR vs. MDR
The main difference between XDR and managed detection and response (MDR) is the managed component of MDR, which provides an organization with third-party security engineers to oversee the solution. XDR is capable of preset responses, but MDR allows for real-time response without the need for additional internal staffing.
While solutions vary by vendor and technology capabilities, MDR generally utilizes a pre-defined technology stack to cover similar areas as XDR: endpoint, network, logs, identity, and the cloud. Also, because MDR is externally managed, organizations that utilize it can monitor their environment and respond to threats more efficiently and effectively, without worrying about resource or budget constraints.
XDR vs. EDR
Endpoint detection and response (EDR) records critical activity like process executions, command line activity, running services, network connections, and file manipulation on endpoints. For many providers, an EDR solution has become a core component of their cybersecurity and, when paired alongside the capabilities of next-generation antivirus (NGAV), it provides robust protection and detection for an organization’s endpoints.
While it’s a valuable tool for IT and security teams looking to better observe behaviors on their endpoints, it only offers visibility into that one segment of an organization’s environment, whereas XDR and MDR provide holistic visibility into endpoints as well as network and cloud environments.
XDR vs. SIEM
Security information and event management (SIEM) is similar to XDR in that it combines long-term data collection from multiple sources with analysis and real-time monitoring of events. However, unlike XDR, SIEM solutions are primarily centered around data collection and alerting, which can lead to a high signal to noise ratio, reoccurring false positives, and alert fatigue. XDR (and MDR), however, streamline that alerting process, providing a centralized view and more accurate alerts.
What Are The Benefits of XDR?
Because XDR is driven by efficiency, it has many advantages, particularly for organizations looking to augment or forgo a SIEM solution, which is a more do-it-yourself (DIY) model for monitoring and detection across the IT environment.
1. Multiple Source Ingestion
XDR enables security teams to extend their detection and response capabilities (hence its name). It does this by enabling cross-telemetry, where many types of logs and data sources created by the various tools in an organization’s tech stack can be ingested into the central XDR platform for analysis and action.
2. Silo Removal
With XDR, analysts are no longer required to switch between multiple consoles to view and respond to alerts from a variety of single sources. Through a centralized platform, XDR helps you unify threat telemetry across your tech stack, creating a sort of in-house hive mind, where every tool is working from the same intelligence and collaborating to identify and respond to active threats.
3. Signal Boost
Traditional tools, while often quite good at protecting the specific aspect of your environment they were designed to guard, traditionally have not done a good job at detecting the signal in a sea of noise. With XDR, however, weak signals from single sources are correlated with telemetry gathered from a variety of sources, leading to a strong signal of potential cyber attack when viewed holistically.
4. Reduction of False Positives
By correlating data and log sources from disparate tools into a single, unified platform, greater context around alerts is created, leading to fewer false positives and less time spent on alert triage, reducing alert fatigue for your team.
5. Faster Response
This same correlation and contextualization of data allows IT and security teams to respond faster to true alerts, limiting the damage of successful cyber attacks, or stopping them from becoming successful in the first place.
6. Operational Efficiency
With security analysts typically spending hours every day reading and responding to a litany of false-positive alerts, operational efficiency can be a struggle for IT teams. XDR helps improve this by allowing for the automation of certain repetitive tasks and reducing the number of actionable alerts, allowing for more efficient analysis and response.
However, many of those advantages can be found in other security solutions — particularly other detection and response solutions like MDR — and the specifics of how each of those advantages works within an environment is highly dependent on the vendor providing the solution.
What Are the Disadvantages of XDR?
While XDR can provide great value, especially in terms of comprehensive visibility, it doesn’t necessarily solve all the security problems an organization may have.
Disadvantages of XDR include:
1. Limited Source Ingestion
XDR vendors often limit their allowed ingestions to a maximum of three tools. This is fine if you’re a small, on-premises organization looking to protect endpoints and identity, but it will quickly fall short for larger orgs with a distributed network or cloud environment, as well as I
2. Focused on the Endpoint
XDR sprang from EDR, meaning that most XDR solutions are still endpoint-centric, with the assumption that all attacks eventually land on the endpoint. While that is largely true, a great deal of damage can be done before an attack lands on an endpoint, meaning XDR is largely a reactive, rather than proactive, solution. And, in today’s modern threat landscape, it’s no longer true that all attacks land on an endpoint, such as SQL injections and server-side business email compromise (BEC).
3. XDR is Another Tool
For all the value XDR provides, however, it is still a tool. This makes it another addition to the tech stack that in-house security team must tune, manage, and operate. And organizations are having a hard enough time finding enough experienced analysts to operate the tools they already have.
4. Still Need SIEM
Although XDR provides advanced threat detection and response features, it cannot replace the capabilities of a SIEM, which remains essential for additional purposes beyond threat detection, such as managing logs, ensuring compliance, and handling non-threat-related data analysis.
Vendors will often tout the ability of XDR to replace a SIEM, however this is only true in reference to a traditional SIEM without native SOAR technology. Most modern SIEMs incorporate SOAR, meaning these two tools combined often are more effective at solving the problem of telemetry over log sources and working in the ability to respond.
5. Open XDR vs. Closed XDR
A key capability which organizations should consider when examining XDR options is whether the tool is “open” (meaning it allows to ingestions from third-party tools) or “closed” (meaning integrations are limited to other tools from the same vendor as the XDR tool). Often, closed XDR providers will permit integrations from third-party tools, but only at an additional cost.
While closed XDR may seem to be a less ideal option when described this simply, it’s important to look at your existing tools and see which version of XDR will work best for your unique environment. If you are already locked into a single vendor, choosing that vendor’s XDR will probably give you the best outcomes, as it’s designed and optimized to collect, correlate, and analyze the data and logs from its sister tools. Just ensure the integrations between tool sets are as seamless as possible for maximum ROI.
Should Your Organization Utilize an XDR Security Solution?
There’s no “one size fits every environment” answer to this question. Organizations must factor in their size, the number of security and operational tools in their environment, and what internal staffing and resources are available for tool management.
The Foundational Requirements of an Effective XDR Solution
Endpoint Visibility and Response Actions
Organizations have historically invested heavily in single source tools like endpoint detection and response (EDR), so it’s vital that XDR can identify and act on actual alerts across all of your organization’s endpoints.
Comprehensive Network Visibility
XDR won’t provide full value unless it can see into, collect logs on, and analyze data from local area networks (LAN) ,virtual private networks (VPN), and wireless LANs.
Support for Log Ingestion from Existing Tools
XDR’s greatest strength is its ability to ingest, correlate, and contextualize data and logs from multiple sources. Look for an XDR vendor that integrates with the tools in your existing tech stack.
Insight Into Cloud Data
Cloud adoption is escalating rapidly among organizations, and having insight and visibility into your cloud is no longer optional. For XDR to be truly valuable, it needs to be able to see, understand, and act on alerts in your cloud environment, as well as correlate with telemetry from other parts of your IT environment.
Data Correlation and Suspicious Action Detection Across Data Feeds
XDR should enable a deep analysis of several high-quality data sources to deliver more accurate detection with less noise, resulting in a faster, more effective response to security threats.
Open-Ended Platform that Allows for Future Integrations
Cybersecurity tools, technologies, and solutions are constantly upgrading and evolving, so it’s crucial that the XDR platform you select won’t be obsolete in a year. Look for an open-XDR platform that is vendor and tool agnostic (allowing you to integrate future additions to your tech stack) or a closed-XDR platform that pairs well with the existing solutions and tools in your tech stack.
Being able to monitor your environment and get real-time alerts is certainly critical to overall cybersecurity, but the response element is becoming paramount as threat actors evolve and breach fallouts intensify.
Organizations should look past XDR and instead focus on a more holistic, operations-focused security approach that combines human expertise with cutting-edge technology.
Arctic Wolf and XDR
Arctic Wolf is focused on security operations, not just adding more tools to your tech stack and hoping that more alerts meet your security needs. Cloud native and built on open-XDR architecture, the Arctic Wolf Aurora™ Platform takes a vendor-neutral approach, providing 24×7 monitoring of the network, endpoint, cloud, and identity sources. This allows for both broad visibility and real-time, advanced alerts.
Where Arctic Wolf differs from a traditional XDR solution, however, is through the managed response portion. The Arctic Wolf® Concierge Experience ensures Arctic Wolf has a complete understanding of an organization’s unique IT environment right from the start. Our security operations center (SOC) then monitors security events enriched and analyzed by the Aurora Platform to provide an organization’s internal security team with coverage and security operations expertise.
By focusing on the human element while understanding that cybersecurity is an ongoing journey, Arctic Wolf exceeds XDR’s capabilities while helping organizations harden their attack surface and reduce their current and future risk levels.
See how leveraging a managed tool like MDR can transform your organization’s cybersecurity architecture.