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How to Realize Your XDR Goals by the End of the Year

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An extended detection and response (XDR) cybersecurity strategy can protect your business through enhanced visibility, faster threat remediation, and improved operational efficiency. But as you probably already know, setting up a comprehensive XDR implementation can be quite difficult.

As we enter the summer, here are 5 aspects that your organization should focus on if you want to realize your cybersecurity goals by the end of this year:

  1. Contextualizing data
  2. Speed of threat detection and remediation
  3. Automating security workflows
  4. Tool integration
  5. Lack of skilled security staff

Contextualizing Data

Without a comprehensive view of all systems and data, you could miss which parts of your infrastructure were affected by an attack. In fact, Dark Reading’s “The State of Cybersecurity Incident Response” report found that 31% of organizations find that assessing the full scope of a security incident is the most difficult aspect of responding to threats.

To improve your detection capability, you need to make sure that your analysts can access all relevant security data. You should integrate logs across all of your endpoints, networks, cloud services, identity, user behavior, email, and any other relevant systems.

Beyond capturing a wide range of data, you need to provide information that helps your analysts determine what context may be useful for a particular alert, what other activity could be related to that incident, and what remediation steps may be useful in containing this threat.

Speed of Threat Detection and Remediation

Most organizations are too slow in responding to cyber attacks.

According to “The State of Extended Detection and Response” report by Cybersecurity Insiders, 78% of companies take 5 days or longer to detect and remediate an active threat. Attackers could use all of that time to propagate further into your systems and severely damage sensitive information and essential parts of your infrastructure.

To avoid costly downtime and data breaches, you need to work on detecting and containing threats faster and more efficiently.

Automating Security Workflows

With traditional security information and event management (SIEM) systems, your organization can quickly get overwhelmed by 1000s of security alerts. Since legacy detection and remediation solutions rely on manual processes, you have to assess, examine, and respond to every single incident individually.

With XDR, you can leverage automation to detect and contain threats in real-time, reducing the risks of damage to your business assets. Through machine learning and AI-powered threat intelligence, you can reduce the amount of security alerts that your human analysts have to handle.

Instead, let your security team focus on the most important investigations.

Tool Integration

Not all XDR solutions are made equal.

Some XDR providers may force you exclusively into their proprietary technology. When you partner with such a vendor, your organization may have to completely abandon all of your previous tools and investments, starting a new threat management system from scratch.

Instead, other XDR providers, especially if they combine XDR with a managed security services approach, can help you leverage all of your existing technologies. Since XDR is a methodology rather than a specific tool, you can achieve all of your desired outcomes with tools from a variety of third-party vendors.

Lack of Skilled Security Staff

Security talent is getting increasingly difficult to come by. For many organizations, a fully in-house security operations team is prohibitively expensive to hire, train, and maintain.

Even if you already have an in-house team, analysts can struggle to keep up with newly emerging threats. As found by Immersive Labs in a recent cyber workforce report, security specialists need around 3 months to learn how to handle a new type of cyber attack. If you hope to stay ahead of the rapidly changing security landscape, your analysts will have to constantly keep training and practicing new techniques and approaches.

Instead, you could partner with a managed security services provider. Outsourced security experts can help you manage cyber risk at a significantly lower cost than an in-house team. Additionally, a managed security provider’s entire business revolves around staying ahead of any new trends within the industry so you can trust them to help you deal with any potential threats that you might face.

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