Published on November 4th, 2023 | by Bibhuranjan

XDR: What It Is, and What It Can Do for Your Company

Are you worried that your company will fall victim to a cyber attack? If you’re not, maybe you should be. Eighty-three percent of organizations experienced multiple data breaches in 2022. And that’s just one kind of cyber attack. Lots of businesses never recover from the reputational and financial damage a single data breach or other cyber attack can do. You need to protect your company and its data.

Extended detection and response (XDR) software is the next level in cybersecurity for your business. It’s a Software as a Service (SaaS) tool that allows you greater visibility into traffic and activity across your network, and can help you detect, respond to, and prevent threats. It can do a lot for your company, including improving workflows and efficiency, protecting your network and devices from all angles, and giving you more control.

Understanding XDR

XDR systems work by collating data from across all of your company’s endpoints, IT environments, clouds, services, and networks. By combining data from multiple layers of your system, it can create a more detailed picture of your entire system, including people working on the cloud. A high-quality XDR tool can track threats all the way through your system, and can even respond to threats without human participation, using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

You can improve your company security with a good XDR system, while still streamlining and simplifying processes, because you can do all of the work from a single dashboard. You can even use a managed XDR security solution, which comes with expert monitoring by a professional security team. That’s a great option to have at your disposal if you can’t afford to hire a cybersecurity team yourself.

How XDR Works

XDR analyzes traffic into, out of, and around your network to assess it for threats, even those that get around your data perimeter. It can monitor all of your endpoints at once, as well as cloud storage, servers, and email. It’s a multi-layered, holistic approach to cybersecurity that gives you visibility into your system as an almost living organism made up of servers, cloud storage, endpoints, email, and other elements, all of which have their own security flaws and features.

XDR systems also use machine learning to identify even zero-day threats that no one knows about yet. They can identify many threats by monitoring traffic on your network, and they can spot more by bringing in known threat definitions and other intelligence. In addition to bringing together data from across different data silos and layers of the network, XDR tools can also provide data that will help you investigate and respond to attacks, such as custom alerts or detailed attack timelines.

Benefits of XDR for Companies

XDR can do so much for your company, especially these days when cyber attacks are getting more sophisticated and more prevalent. Your cybersecurity team will be able to see a bird’s eye view of your company’s entire digital landscape, with data integrated from across many layers of sources. You’ll see what’s going on with your company’s email security, what’s happening at endpoints, and what’s moving through your network, into and out of the different data environments and silos in your company.

You’ll get to take control of your company’s data, setting passwords and ensuring that only employees who can be trusted and who need specific sensitive information in order to perform their tasks can get access to it. You can strengthen protection of your company’s data perimeter, and of its endpoints and cloud data. It automates many formerly manual security processes, so you can enjoy reduced costs and increased efficiency.

Because they use machine learning and AI, XDR systems improve over time, as they learn how to better detect and respond to threats. That means you don’t have to worry about your XDR system not being able to handle new cyber threats. AI and machine learning are integral parts of most XDR software tools, and they can give you the freedom to get more enterprise security with fewer staff or, if you choose a managed XDR solution, at a lower monthly rate.

XDR has so many benefits for companies looking to boost their cybersecurity in the face of increasing threats and attacks. The right XDR tool will not only protect you from the threats of today, but it will also learn to protect you from the threats of tomorrow – and it could save your company money and time, too.

Cover Image by Freepik

Tags: AI, cyber attack prevention, data breach protection, XDR security

About the Author

Bibhuranjan Editorial Officer, technofaq.org I'm an avid tech enthusiast at heart. I like to mug up on new and exciting developments on science and tech and have a deep love for PC gaming. Other hobbies include writing blog posts, music and DIY projects.