Five Best Practices for CISO’s Adopting XDR.

XDR (extended detection and response) is a word which has received a lot of hype over the last few years, used correctly, an XDR solution can unite multiple isolate security tools and reduce the complexity that hinders fast detection and response.

Globally, 31% of organisations have adopted XDR, and of those, 76% agree that adopting XDR has strengthened their organisation’s cyber resiliency. **

Here are five key best practices that make a strong case for adopting XDR:

1. Leverage Strong EDR Foundations

XDR is based upon the foundations of EDR, endpoint detection and response, and includes all the benefits which EDR provides. But XDR exceeds further than just endpoint protection and provides detection and response across your organisations entire IT network. Consequently, it gives your IT team far greater visibility and analysis of threats targeting your organisation. EDR’s ability to provide real-time behavioural detection and remediation can be applied more broadly across the organisation with XDR. Threats on your network can be identified earlier with the use of XDR and therefore be remediated quicker, prior to any impact. The in-depth intel means that you can have a more complete story of what is going on inside the whole enterprise security estate.

2. Maximise the Value of Your Existing Security Investments

How does XDR help maximise the value of your security investments? Open XDR concentrates on backend analytics and workflow and can integrate with an organisation’s existing workflow. This flexibility makes sense as many organisations have tools and technologies deployed already in their SOC, which to decommission these tools would be a loss to the organisation. Best-in-breed technologies provide reliable point solution coverage, but each comes with a steep learning curve and operational burden for SecOps efficiency. Switching these out for a new tool would simply trigger you on another learning curve with a new burden. XDR allows you to make use of your existing tools, connecting them through built-in integrations.

3. Increase Efficiency of Your Security Team

Forbes IT Skills Gap Report 2023 states that 93% of the 500 business’ they surveyed reported an IT Skills gap. As the IT landscape is constantly changing this skills gap continues to grow, making an XDR solution integral for unburdening understaffed IT teams. Cyber security analysts are under pressure and the adoption of an XDR solution would mean automatically correlating related activity into unified alerts, which drastically simplifies the task for IT analysts and relives them from the growing pressures.

4. Automate Rumination to Contain Attacks Faster

Automation is crucial to maximising the value of your existing tools and to unburdening your IT team. Automation improves both threat detection and response. Additionally, it also reduces the manual effort needed and reduces the skillset barrier of responding to alerts. In conclusion, your team will be relieved of work and any threats will be contained quicker.

5. Deliver Measurable Outcomes

In the 2022 Gartner Board of Directors Survey, 88% of board members classified cybersecurity as a business risk. This growing concern on cyber security of organisations from the board means an increased pressure on IT Teams to provide concrete evidence that the business is protected from the latest threats as they continue to invest. XDR means no more delivering of proof points to boards, as XDR is effective in detecting techniques and tactics that indicate threatening behaviour, across the entire enterprise security estate.  XDR can monitor stealth behaviour, effectively identify fileless attacks, lateral movement, and actively executing rootkits, so you can be confident in your organisations security posture.

Original Content written by SentinelOne

**IBM’s 6th annual Cyber Resilient Organization Study