5 ways today’s XDR solutions are failing you

Cybersecurity professionals are turning to extended detection and response (XDR) solutions to simplify key functions in security operations. But even if you’re confident in your approach to XDR, you may want to revisit whether it is resilient enough to keep up with evolving and increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.

XDR is intended to monitor, detect, and respond to threats across your cybersecurity environment with consolidated telemetry, unified visibility and coordinated response. The solution aims to unify security incident detection and response by:

• Automatically collecting and correlating telemetry from multiple security tools
• Applying analytics to detect malicious activity
• Responding to and remediating threats

To some extent, XDR extends endpoint detection and response (EDR) strategies to correlate data across all vectors—email, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and networks.

Many organizations have invested in and often struggle with limitations of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms that collect and analyze log data, and Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) solutions that coordinate information and orchestrate response across security tools. Both are viewed as overly complex and difficult to integrate.

“SIEMs are able to aggregate information across many different sources, but don’t give you the context of a particular event or responsive capabilities to deal with it,” says Briana Farro, Cisco Director of Product Management, Threat Detection & Response. “SOARs provide orchestration through disparate tools, but many organizations don’t have the bandwidth for setting up the rules of how to respond to correlated events.”

Getting XDR right will overcome some of those SIEM and SOAR issues and empower security teams to prioritize threats by impact, detect threats sooner and accelerate response. To be effective, XDR solutions must be comprehensive, correlating data across all vectors—and enabling visibility and context across your environment. But there are at least five ways in which current XDR solutions may be falling short and over-complicating your security operations:

• Not keeping pace with AI uptake in SecOps: AI and machine learning are increasingly used in security operations and incident response to analyze data, detect threats, and automate response, improving orchestration between tools. AI and ML are not new concepts, but they are constantly evolving, and XDR solutions need to keep pace.

• Mistaking correlation for causation: Analytics are great for finding patterns, but it’s important to differentiate between correlation and causation to avoid false positives. Correlating a relationship or pattern of activity across multiple security layers and systems doesn’t necessarily provide insight into the cause, and in fact could steer you to a false conclusion. XDR must be able not only to alert you that something is going on, but to provide context and analysis as to what is causing that alert so it can be fixed.

• Lack of integration and automation: This should include not only native integrations with solutions offered by your XDR vendor but also telemetry and security from third-party solutions to give security teams a single, context-rich view. Moreover, automation and orchestration capabilities in XDR solutions can elevate the productivity of security teams while easing the cybersecurity skills shortage by helping them eliminate large amounts of repetitive and time-consuming tasks.

• Ignoring the impact of UX on the analyst experience: A poorly designed user interface can cause frustration and fatigue, leading to errors and poor decision-making. This impacts your team’s ability to defend and protect your environment.

• Not prioritizing by risk: For XDR to have the impact it promises, insights must be prioritized. The solution must be able to align business risk and security risk to ensure the potential impact of a threat is fully understood and appropriately prioritized.

An XDR solution that is open, extensible and cloud-first, should provide unified detection and event correlation across your environment without additional complexity. Your XDR solution should easily integrate with your entire security stack with native backend to frontend integration, so coverage stays consistent even as vendors make portfolio changes. Get the most out of your security stack’s threat detection by considering XDR solutions with threat intelligence capabilities.

Learn more about the role and capabilities of XDR.