The front end of a system is what people see and interact with, but there’s so much going on behind the scenes that even admins might not fully understand it all. The many threats that abound can render your system inoperative at the snap of a finger.

It's in your best interest to adopt a holistic cybersecurity technique to protect your network instead of addressing each problem individually, and Extended Detection and Response can help you do just that.

What Is Extended Detection and Response (XDR)?

Extended Detection and Response (XDR) combines multiple tools to collect data from all areas of your system. It evaluates the data and responds to threats with in-depth visibility of activities in your network.

Some cyber threats are so technical, you need advanced computing skills to understand and resolve them. XDR adopts a simple approach to cybersecurity by simplifying defense mechanisms in a way that helps you save time and resources.

How Does XDR Work?

The essence of XDR is to enhance your ability to secure your digital assets. It uses a variety of tools to access your data and protects it against contamination. XDR works in the following ways.

Telemetry and Data Analysis

Extended Detection and Response has a wide coverage that allows it to collect and evaluate data from multiple sources including cloud services, endpoints, and networks. Understandably, these platforms produce high traffic and generate tons of data—some of which is malicious and can endanger your system.

XDR has advanced data analysis capabilities that help you identify and prioritize significant threats. The system raises an alarm when it detects suspicious activities. But instead of launching an impulsive response, it maps out the threats and then initiates a targeted incident response plan. By doing this, XDR helps you save time and resources, enabling you to focus on securing your digital assets at every point in time rather than embarking on a wild goose chase.

Detection

While you need to be alert and secure your system, being overzealous in that regard is counterproductive. Extended Detection and Response plays a detective role by establishing baselines or metrics for threats. In other words, it ensures that your system doesn’t swing into defense mode over activities that are normal or unmalicious.

XDR scans all the alerts it receives and ensures that a particular action meets the threat criteria before taking action. Not only does it identify the behavioral patterns of threats, but it also evaluates them extensively to figure out their triggers, origin, and possible impact.

Response

XDR is capable of stopping and removing any threat it detects within your system. Beyond that, it can also update the security policies you have on the ground to ensure that such threats don’t occur again. It doesn’t just do this on endpoint and workload-related assets but covers all the security assets within your system.

What Are the Benefits of XDR?

Extended Detection and Response helps you worry less about the security of your cyber environments, so you can focus on other important tasks. If you adopt XDR in your cybersecurity, you stand to enjoy several benefits.

Prioritize Security Alerts

Dealing with thousands of threat alerts can be overwhelming. You might lose sight of your goal in responding to every alert you receive. Extended Detection and Response helps you prioritize your most important digital assets by sieving the many alerts and focusing on the most critical ones. Its data analysis feature allows it to group similar threats into the same categories and respond to them as one instead of separately.

Higher Visibility

Extended Detection and Response gives you a complete picture of your network and its security. Unlike other techniques like Endpoint Detection Response (EDR) that focus on endpoints, XDR gives you 360 degree visibility of your system. It brings hidden threats to your notice and gives you a breakdown of where they came from and how they could or have impacted your system. It can also protect you against insider threats that you would ordinarily overlook.

Automation

XDR saves you a lot of manual work. You don’t have to rack your brain to manually identify and combat cyber threats. It has artificial intelligence to identify and respond to threats automatically without your input. And it does this very fast. XDR eradicates threats early enough before they escalate and harm your network even more.

Integrated Response

XDR offers an integrated incident response plan that covers all aspects of your security. This involves a holistic approach that includes both hidden and visible areas within your environment. It's a lot better than tackling cyber threats in every area of your system individually.

3 Common XDR Mistakes to Avoid

There’s no questioning the ability of Extended Detection and Response in enhancing cybersecurity. However, some factors could make it less effective. Let’s take a look at the most common XDR mistakes to avoid for high performance and value.

1. Improper Automation

XDR thrives on automation. Having the ability to not only identify threats but analyze the gravity of such threats and respond to them automatically is key. If your system is not fully automated to execute those functions, you won’t get the most out of your XDR efforts.

2. Inadequate Integration

The most effective XDR plan is one that you can fully integrate into your cyber environment. It should align with your current cyber framework without many changes or alterations. When the integration requires a lot of work, you may not have the technical skills to pull it off.

3. Complex Operations

You’ll enjoy implementing XDR more if it’s simple to operate and maintain. When your XDR is complex, you spend more time and resources trying to understand and implement it. You must ensure that it’s simple enough before going ahead with it.

Simplifying Your Cybersecurity Approach With XDR

Like most cybersecurity strategies, Extended Detection and Response requires continuous efforts to be the most effective. You must pay close attention to your network to evaluate its performance and identify areas for improvement. As your system changes, you must adapt to keep up with rising threats.

You know you are in safe hands when your XDR application operates across different areas of your system, collecting and making sense of multiple data sets to generate a unified solution.