Extended Detection and Response (XDR) analyzes data from email, endpoints, cloud resources, and other points across a network to inform threat protection and network monitoring. This allows XDR to find, provide detailed information on, and potentially remediate malware and other threats that try to steal or damage sensitive data on a business’ network. Extended detection and response allow for a deeper understanding of network threats than other forms of detection and response, such as EDR or NDR. The best XDR solutions bring together informed threat alerts, detailed analytics, and automation that helps IT staff understand and quickly remediate threats that would have flown under the radar for long periods of time.
What is XDR?
XDR functions similarly to endpoint detection and response (EDR), but, as the name suggests, it extends EDR functions to improve visibility into threats and remediation tactics. These extended functions allow XDR to aggregate more information on potential threats and automatically remediate threats on the network so that an IT team can make more informed decisions when implementing solutions and save time addressing active problems. By providing a deeper level of detection and response, XDR makes finding malicious activity anywhere a business does work possible. A strong extended detection and response platform can deploy at any site and monitor first- and third-party activity to help a business run securely.
XDR Capabilities
XDR can provide visibility and threat monitoring essentially everywhere in a business’ IT environment, including cloud connections, email services, applications, software, and network endpoints. Even if these services come from different vendors, they can be monitored and acted on to help gather data and automatically address suspicious activity. With the help of machine learning and cutting-edge threat research, XDR can also identify where threats are active and highlight which suspicious activities are related to the same attack, which helps IT staff and IT consultants understand what has gone wrong on the network – even after the threat has been automatically remediated.
Improved Response & Investigation
What makes XDR unique is its abilities to drastically improve the response times to active threats and the data collection capabilities it has to inform IT team members. A reliable extended detection and response solution can use the analytics it collects to prioritize the threats it finds and alert staff to the most important issues that need human intervention. With the right threat intelligence, XDR can even provide informed remediation strategies for complex threats that aren’t automatically dealt with. This helps an IT team respond faster to anything suspicious that appears on the network because they have data from across the environment at their fingertips and pointed information that can help fill skill or information gaps.
Summary
Extended detection and response takes EDR and NDR capabilities to the next level and offers deep insight into both first- and third-party areas of a business’ IT environment. With this extended range, the solution can gather more data than other services, provide prioritized threat information, and help remediate threats as soon as they are found. If your growing business may benefit from an extended level of security or your business needs more information on what XDR can do for you, then our security specialists are ready to talk today! Our team is always ready to offer a complimentary consultation to businesses, so we can help find the best solutions for your unique IT environment!
