Enhancing Cyber Resilience through Extended Detection and Response (XDR)

Summary

Advanced attacks represent a challenge for organizations that are getting breached due to architectural misfits and resource challenges
Enlarging the width and depth of threat detection and response helps improve the cyber resilience of enterprise environments
The Forrester New Wave™: Extended Detection and Response (XDR) Providers, Q4 2021 report, helps cybersecurity professionals to navigate the new XDR space

Top reasons for cybersecurity breaches

Breaches like this one keep repeating like a sad song – with an undiscovered cyber-attack for a staggering… 17 months. Security incidents are not only hurting business’ reputation and bottom lines but also customers in ways not always easy to foresee. We at Bitdefender, are sympathetic to these challenges. With increasing digitalization of business and an underinvestment in cybersecurity across many organizations, these stories are likely to continue. While businesses have to shoulder responsibility for their strategy and execution of it, the cybersecurity industry needs to help as well. We now live in a time when cyber risk requires cyber resilience – the ability of an organization to prevent cyber-attacks from causing incidents or to detect and respond to them in a manner which limits the impact to a pre-defined risk tolerance – is a duty for any organization.

There are two main drivers for cybersecurity breaches, the ones we know and the ones we don’t know about.

First, cyber threats are on a constant evolution curve, with the sophisticated attacks of yesterday becoming the norm as we speak. This reality exposes the entire spectrum of organizations to a higher degree of cyber risk over time.
Second, even if there is an increase in the resources allocated to cyber security, many organizations are likely to remain one step or more behind the attackers’ capabilities. This is due to multiple causes, including the well-known security personnel shortage but also due to “misfits” in their cybersecurity architecture. Flows like not matching the security solutions to the risk exposure, trading (too much of the) security posture for convenience or creating a security infrastructure that cannot be handled effectively by the security operations team.

The emergence of XDR

The cybersecurity industry is responding to challenges like these with a new concept that businesses, large and small, can consider becoming more resilient against the growing risk – Extended Detection and Response (XDR). Emerging out of EDR, XDR unifies security-relevant endpoint detections with telemetry from non-endpoint sources such as network visibility, email security, identity and access management, cloud security, and more. In other words, it streamlines the cybersecurity architecture, optimizing threat detection, incident investigation and response. XDR, done well, also reduces the pressure on security operations, a key challenge for most organization as mentioned above. And by done well, we mean not simply adding new data sources but building the analytics to enable productive use of this extended telemetry data.

Third party XDR report

Navigating new options always presents a challenge for busy security professionals, and industry analysts’ research and reports are valuable to reduce the learning curve and make faster, better decisions. Following the August release of the New Tech: Extended Detection And Response (XDR) Providers, Q3 2021, Forrester published the first report of XDR solutions, The Forrester New Wave: Extended Detection and Response (XDR) Providers, Q4 2021 report, authored by the same analyst Allie Mellen and we are pleased to share it with security practitioners, compliments of Bitdefender.

We are delighted to see the report including Bitdefender among the evaluated vendors. Quoting the report:

“Bitdefender combines endpoint and network telemetry and alerts for detection and investigation, with response capabilities for endpoint. The vendor gives customers incredible transparency and works closely with the community to improve its product security.

(Bitdefender XDR) is the best fit for companies that need a reliable and easy-to-use offering. Bitdefender brings a straightforward combination of endpoint and network telemetry but lacks other native or third-party telemetry sources and in-depth response capabilities.”

XDR cyber resilience webinar

To help you get a deeper perspective on XDR, we invite you to join a 45-minute webinar with Allie Mellen as guest speaker, hosted by Bitdefender on November 2^nd. You will learn how XDR enhances cyber resilience as well as some key findings from the Forrester New Wave report. Meet you there!