What is Extended Detection & Response (XDR)?

Keeping your business secure should be a top priority in 2022. It gives your customers and staff greater peace of mind, reduces your overheads, and builds trust that will extend for years to come. One of the best ways to build this trust through cybersecurity is with XDR.

It is important to respond immediately, and correctly, to detected threats. Comprehensive detection capability from network to endpoint and the ability to respond immediately and automatically, Samurai XDR has it all.

In this post, we're going to cover all that you need to know to get started with this latest cybersecurity tool.

What is Extended Detection & Response?

Abbreviated as XDR, Extended Detection & Response systems are the evolution of Network Detection and Response (NDR). NDR is a kind of security tooling that focuses on keeping you secured by analyzing activity on your network. It's great for keeping a workplace secure, even if that workplace happens to be "unconventional", like a café or store.

XDR pushes NDR even further — focusing on your endpoints, as well as your network. By taking a more comprehensive view, XDR is better at detecting threats before they do damage.

You can think of XDR as consolidating the features of several services into one "extended" service. It provides your business with well-rounded protection, no matter what your business's network and connected devices look like.

How XDR compares to NDR and EDR

NDR was designed to identify and protect your infrastructure assets by detecting threats through network activity analysis. The analysis may also include observing and decoding traffic on the network between your devices. When NDR identifies a threat a response action is initiated, this ensures that your data and devices are safe from internal and external threats.

EDR, which is short for Endpoint Detection and Response, on the other hand, uses similar tools to protect the endpoints and hosts of your network. You can think of it providing the last bastion on protection by monitoring and guarding the host asset. It makes sure that nothing malicious gets access to your hosts or at least minimizes damage by terminating risky or unknown processes which may be malicious in nature, especially those threats that may not be easily observed on the network.

So how does XDR compare to these two cybersecurity tools? It combines them! With XDR, you get all of the security features that NDR and EDR provide and more. It's a full-scope, fully-featured cybersecurity solution for a variety of use cases. Even better, its mission is to be cloud-delivered so you don't need to worry about installing and maintaining yet another technology.

In summary, NDR is your eyes and ears on the network, EDR providing same and more at the host. Combining these telemetry point with Firewall, Proxy and authentication systems you have a powerful tool to detection and respond to threats with a 360 degree point of view.

Which is right for your business?

Many businesses can get by with just NDR. But that's all you'll be doing — just getting by. If your business needs to expand, adapt to newer working conditions (like work-from-home), then you may find that NDR doesn't give that holistic protection. NDR can also fall short in hybrid work environments. If employees are connecting from locations away from the corporate network, the platform can’t monitor and assess their activity.

EDR, on the other hand, focuses on the endpoint. Businesses with pre-established cybersecurity solutions might find EDR slightly more appealing due to its maturity but also a challenge due to the complexity of the technology itself, that is, it's not an Antivirus application.

Like NDR, EDR lacks full visibility over your entire infrastructure, which something that XDR provides through the aggregation and correlation “extended” supported of devices, including cloud.

For most businesses, XDR is the ideal solution. It's simple, all-in-one, and comprehensive. It protects your endpoints, which makes hybrid work environments safe.

It's your scalable, set-it-and-forget-it cybersecurity solution for keeping your network and devices safe.

3 benefits of XDR

To help you better understand why your business should consider adopting XDR, we've collected just a handful of the immense benefits it has to offer. Here are the key features you can expect after adopting an XDR solution.

Complex reactions to infections

EDR tends to have what we'd call a "simple" reaction to a detected infection. When something malicious is detected, it deploys the same set of protocols to keep it contained, regardless of what device or network the threat is detected on.

XDR is far more adaptable. It'll detect where the threat is taking place and how it could affect the device or network. It then responds with actions that make sense as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach.

Automation

XDR also has built-in automation features. This allows it to respond to detected threats faster and more accurately, around the clock. It can perform complex workflows in sequence, reducing the workload on your IT team.

This gives your IT team more time to focus on tasks that XDR can't handle. You'll get better performance from your built-in network security and your staff personnel.

Increased visibility

XDR provides you with increased visibility, too. Where EDR focuses on the endpoints of your network and NDR offers an incomplete view, XDR is there to give you a comprehensive view of your network security at all times.

It's a full-scope solution, so you get end-to-end visibility of your network and its cybersecurity status. This allows you to be more reactive and accurate with how your network security is handled.

XDR in action

Now that you know what XDR is and some of the benefits it has to offer, let's take a look at it in action. Below are three real-world use cases for XDR. This is what XDR can do for your business!

Find threats

You may not like to hear it, but the truth is that there are likely threats already lurking in your network right now. And they could be going right underneath your security team's noses!

That's because many threats to your network security are hard to spot, especially when your network is larger or contains more connected devices.

Fortunately, XDR can comb through vast amounts of data with ease and precision. It'll find any existing threats quickly or even allow your IT team to hunt in XDR’s data lake with ease.

Assess threats

When an XDR solution does inevitably find threats, it'll then assess them providing severity and confidence levels from its AI/ML and curated Threat Intelligence. This is one of the most powerful features of XDR and it's a bit lacking with regards to NDR and EDR.

XDR will spot, assess, prioritize, and correlate threats that already exist within your network. This is hours, if not days, of work that would normally be placed on the shoulders of your security team — or whoever is responsible for security in your business.

With XDR, these threats will instantly be brought to their attention in an organized fashion, showing them exactly what needs to be addressed and how.

Investigate threats

Lastly, an XDR solution will facilitate investigative tasks to providing you with as much information on a threat as possible. It'll look to see where a threat originated, how it spread, and what it's done/doing to your network/devices.

This gives your team the ability to collaborate with other teams in your organization and ultimately accurately respond and neutralize the threats to your network security. Rather than testing different security protocols or working to understand a threat, you'll have all of this information and more provided to you.

Make XDR core to your cybersecurity strategy with Samurai XDR

XDR technology is one of the most potent and useful cybersecurity solutions available today. And lucky for you, you don't have to wait to take advantage of it! Samurai XDR has just launched an XDR service designed to keep you safe. Reach out to our team today to learn more.