The Evolution of Modern XDR

What is Extended Detection and Response (XDR), and why is it so important? The simple answer is that XDR is the latest point in the long evolution of enterprise security. A solutioning sector that started decades ago with simple antivirus protection has grown exponentially toward modern platforms that deliver highly dynamic, scalable and proactive cybersecurity protections across the enterprise. Let’s take a closer look at XDR and how to harness its potential for strong cybersecurity with seamless integration, lower noise and more proactive approaches for both detection and response. 

The Long Road to XDR 
XDR is the evolutionary result of enterprise protection tooling efforts that date back to basic antivirus software in the 1980s. That’s when Norton Antivirus, McAfee Antivirus, Dr. Solomon’s Antivirus Toolkit and other solutions conducted basic scanning on relatively limited systems; doing a scan on a 10GB hard drive was considered a major job back then. 

The word “malware" soon replaced “virus" as an umbrella term for a growing variety of malicious programs: adware, spyware, ransomware, potentially unwanted programs (PUP), worms and more. To combat these expanding threats, vendors developed more features such as Host Firewall, Device Control, Web Traffic Filtering and other protections that collectively became known as Endpoint Protection (EPP) tools. 

Then came Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions, which added SOC capabilities to investigate incidents on a separate track without slowing down systems or saddling developers and system administrators with excessive security bottlenecks. From there, Network Detection & Response introduced nuanced analytics for user and entity behavior to look for patterns and anomalies – such as when a 9 to 5 bookkeeping employee in Brooklyn suddenly logs on at 3am from the Cayman Islands to initiate a financial wire transfer.  

Implementing XDR for Stronger Security 
Eventually, this layered evolution toward more sophisticated and proactive cyber protections brought the world to where we are today, with XDR as a modern consolidation of tools and data to deliver extended visibility, analysis and response across all endpoints, workloads, users and networks.  

The term eXtended Detection and Response (XDR) is relatively new. It was coined by Nir Zuk of Palo Alto Networks in a keynote speech back in 2018.  Since then, Gartner has defined it as “a SaaS-based, vendor-specific, security threat detection and incident response tool that natively integrates multiple security products into a cohesive security operations system that unifies all licensed components.” 

Key to that definition is that – by definition – XDR is cloud based, a major selling point among SMBs in particular. And XDR is vendor agnostic, able to ingest data from everywhere and generate security alerts for the SoC team to consume. In this way, XDR is similar to Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). But XDR’s roots in EPP and EDR technology allow it to deliver a powerful endpoint protection component that adds preventive capabilities so that XDR is both detection AND prevention. It’s easy to see the allure of XDR, especially for SMBs and other organizations that appreciate the ability to run XDR entirely in the cloud. 

But for all the selling points, XDR is not turnkey. Organizations typically find themselves at square one when it comes to configuring the XDR solution in order to reap optimal value from the technology investment.  Our next blog will explore some of the most common XDR implementation challenges and judgment calls – and how these issues are leading more organizations to seek out a partner for a managed XDR, or MXDR solution. 

Learn more here.