Cyberattacks continue to rise in number, as well as in sophistication. New tactics using machine learning and multi-phase attacks, as well as the increase in distributed and home-based workforces all make defending against cybercrime a challenge. In response, CISOs and IT security departments are deploying more proactive and integrated cybersecurity solutions for analytics and automation, such as extended detection and response (XDR).
What is XDR?
Extended detection and response, or XDR, is an emerging, cybersecurity solution with a range of threat detection and response capabilities. XDR collects and analyzes data collected from across an enterprise to identify potential advanced threats.
XDR collects data from a wider range of infrastructure components. These include cloud workloads, network traffic, edge routers, databases, and system events to provide a broad picture of security threats.
Security teams also benefit from the unified view of threat data, security settings, network infrastructure, and security policies. By putting all security data and alerts in one place, security analysts have better visibility across the entire environment and more opportunities to identify complex security threats.
Security professionals face several tough challenges protecting their organization’s data and IT systems. XDR can help security teams to better understand and react to potential attacks.
What security operations challenges does XDR solve?
The growth of IT security point solutions
Over time, IT organizations tend to accumulate multiple standalone security tools, from malware filters and web application firewalls to network traffic analysis, and intrusion detection systems. This confusion of security tools can be especially acute at companies that have their own data centers.
Often, these standalone applications don’t interoperate with the other security solution being used. A unified XDR platform allows security professionals to view, investigate, and manage security threats and policies across the enterprise. In addition, many XDR platforms integrate with existing cybersecurity products.
Advanced, multi-layered threats
Cyberattacks increasingly employ multiple types of threats to evade detection. For instance, a Denial of Service (DoS) attack may provide cover to a database attack, or a malicious script disguised as a trusted utility or process might plant a back door in a user’s computer while simultaneously replicating itself to other computers on the network. Identifying these attacks requires broad, contextual data and analytics that can spot a malicious pattern.
Shortage of cybersecurity expertise
Cybersecurity Ventures reports that cybersecurity jobs are increasingly hard to fill, with 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs globally in 2021. That leaves many under-staffed IT security teams scrambling to keep abreast of the constant flood of security alerts sent by the various, non-integrated, security tools, XDR can significantly ease the workload by automatically collecting and analyzing data from multiple sources and providing updates via a single, integrated interface.
XDR filters out the false positives, saving security professionals the need to investigate every alert, while also automating many manual processes.
- Increased regulations on data security: Regulatory compliance is a challenge for organizations in almost every industry. Data privacy and security regulations require companies to safeguard consumer data against theft.
- Non-compliance or, worse, a data breach is expensive at best and catastrophic at worst. An integrated XDR platform makes it easier to quickly identify and defend against threats as well as verify compliance with security regulations.
- Rising costs: All these challenges, rising regulations, scarcity and cost of cybersecurity expertise, more sophisticated attacks, and siloed security tools– add to the cost of cybersecurity. Gartner expects cybersecurity spending to hit $170.4 billion in 2022.
At the same time, the cost of a data breach is also rising. An undetected threat can lead to data breaches, IT outages, loss of business, regulatory fines, and more. The Ponemon Institute estimates that, on average, a data breach costs an organization $3.86 million, which includes loss of business revenue. An XDR solution offers an effective and affordable way to tackle rising cybercrime.
How we’re helping clients with data breach prevention
As IT organizations implement increasingly diversified and distributed computing environments, they must consolidate and modernize their cybersecurity solutions. A centralized XDR platform, provided by a managed security services provider, provides an enterprise-wide detection and response platform to protect against all types of threats.
Introducing TierPoint CleanIP™ XDR
Our new product, TierPoint CleanIP™ XDR provides SOC as a Service with SIEM as a Service to deliver all the benefits of an integrated XDR solution with support from trusted security analysts and engineers. The security solution uses analytics from diverse information sources including logs, performance metrics, security alerts, and configuration changes to identify threats, including multi-layered attacks. Unlike disparate cybersecurity tools, TierPoint CleanIP™ XDR consolidates all alerts, analysis, and data into one place.
TierPoint CleanIP™ XDR features include:
- real-time threat intelligence feeds
- machine learning and automation to correlate threats throughout the environment
- rapid detection and resolutions
- and SOCaaS services to identify events and mitigate threats
Customers can also take advantage of TierPoint’s cybersecurity consulting, management, and customization services. TierPoint can also monitor a hybrid environment ranging from cloud to on-premises devices. TierPoint’s Security Operations Center (SOC), which can provide incident response across their TierPoint-managed environment, coordinating between the client and our support teams to perform the steps necessary to mitigate and respond to events.
Learn more about TierPoint’s new CleanIP XDR solution by downloading the solution specifications and watching the webinar Next-Gen Data Breach Prevention: Extended Detection and Response (XDR).
