One of the ways that people protect their assets in today’s digital environment is through endpoint protection platforms and the like. But some make more sense than others, depending on what type of protection you need, where your business takes place, and how at-risk you might be to cyber threats. You can bet, though, that in a lot of cases, XDR meets the needs that you have in protecting your business from those threats.
What Is XDR?
There’s a significant number of ways that your business can fall victim to cyber attacks. Luckily, XDR considers many of these in its execution, and it empowers you and your security team to defend your business on various fronts, with various methodologies that work together to create a robust system. This protection platform does differ from others like EDR, though.
One of the main differences between XDR and EDR is the scope of its visibility: while EDR, or endpoint detection and response, focuses on providing in-depth analysis and protection of one platform, XDR, or extended detection and response, is a protection program that integrates with all your various endpoints and entryways into the network, including email and cloud-based operation.
This integrated approach means that XDR is capable of seeing farther into the digital landscape to identify potential threats to you and your business’s security; being capable of identifying odd behaviors in the cloud makes it easier for you to segment and isolate the problematic node before it connects with your network and does additional damage.
What Does It Protect?
XDR attaches itself to various endpoints, including IoT (Internet of Things) devices, making it easy to defend against attacks on that front just as well as with your personal computer. However, there’s more to it than that: you can protect your email servers by offering detection and response to threats that may be present there as well. Similarly, you can protect your network, and even the connections your network makes to cloud workloads of various types. XDR extends its reach past just the endpoint, making it ideal in many ways to businesses who use these various avenues and suspect they might be targets for cyber attackers.
What Does It Protect Against?
Using an XDR cybersecurity tool obviously helps firstly by protecting against attack campaigns identified by threat intelligence, and by using this intelligence, it’s far simpler overall to keep ahead of these campaigns. Additionally, this threat intelligence can inform what vectors are used for certain cyber attacks, which is exceedingly useful when you have automated control over the security of each and every level.
XDR also can aid a business in protecting against data loss. Automated responses to various types of threats make this platform ideal when discovering attacks from multiple fronts, and even when discovering these, it’s as easy as allowing the tool to take action first, and ask questions later. This protects you from having to act on your own when trying to save your business from a fast-moving cyber attack campaign.
What Are Some Other Benefits?
A good XDR platform will offer easy remediation for the times when an attack is successful in compromising something of yours; no matter the situation, you can use XDR to automate remediation based on certain triggers, or in some cases to do it in one click, without the tedious hassle of having to code your response to a specific threat type.
You can also use XDRs to rapidly analyze data from threat intelligence (internal and external alike), making it an excellent resource for better understanding of attack trends and the ways that you can safeguard against them.
Aside from all that, XDR also offers an integrated, holistic visibility of the numerous levels that can be used in a cyber attack: your email server, your network, your endpoints, and your cloud services are all behind the same pane of glass when you need to monitor them for behaviors that don’t fit the norm.
These elements of overall visibility, one-click resolution, and threat intelligence make it a far simpler system to get a grasp on than other protection platforms: it becomes exceedingly user-friendly thanks to these features, and it still offers high levels of security that would otherwise need to be developed. Because of this, XDR is a flexible solution that fits many businesses and users.
Do I Need XDR Cybersecurity?
It’s not always the best idea to jump into a specific platform right away. If you’re a user who stays on one endpoint all the time, doesn’t make use of cloud operations, and has high visibility of what goes on in your limited network, then you may not need XDR. However, with the increasing persistence with which industries of all kinds are migrating to the cloud and beginning to use multiple devices to work from, there’s an increasing need for the solutions that XDR brings to the table.
If you find yourself in need of a protection platform that considers the scope of various devices and other security levels, you may find that XDR is actually a smart choice for you. If you’re in need of a solution that simplifies the responses you have to take against cyber threats, this is also a great idea for you. Overall, XDR is exactly what it promises: it’s a detection and response system that extends far beyond the endpoint itself. And if that’s what you need in your business today, this is probably a solution worth exploring, especially to keep your assets safe.
