3 Ways XDR Will Streamline Your SOC
Your security stack represents your toolkit: each tool allows you to parse the constant streams of application, log, and server data flowing throughout your organization into genuine threat intel. In the last half-decade, many tools have pushed the boundaries of their own niches – next-gen firewalls, for instance, have seen increasingly impressive ways of digging deeper into packet data. In an effort to gain the best overview possible, many organizations cram their security stacks with as many hyper-specified tools as budgets allow for. While each siloed tool keeps track of its own piece of the security puzzle, it’s still up to analysts to accurately build the wider picture.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions take a step back from the edge of high-fidelity data collection, and focus on transforming the threat info being recorded by each tool into wider, cross-referenced insight into your wider security wellbeing. This article will examine what XDR can offer SOC teams, and assess the tool’s on-the-ground impact.
Gartner XDR Market Guide
XDR is an evolving technology that can offer unified threat prevention, detection, and response capabilities...
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How Does XDR Work?
1. Data Collection
2. Data Aggregation
3. Data Enrichment
4. Threat Detection
5. Threat Investigation
6. Automated Response
7. Reporting and Analytics
Benefits of XDR to Cybersecurity
Alert Fatigue Reduction
Rapid Threat Detection
Efficiency
How Does XDR Benefit the SOC?
A Security Operations Center (SOC) is an organization’s centralized unit that focuses on monitoring, investigating, and responding to cybersecurity threats and incidents. Put simply, the incident response team executes the response and mitigation strategies developed by the SOC. At the same time, SOC managers and leaders work closely with executive management, providing reports, seeking approvals for security policies/budgets, and ensuring alignment with the organization’s overall security strategy.
Firstly, XDRs aid the SOC by offering an organization-wide point of comparison. Before XDR, analysts would have to essentially translate the issues from team to team, massively adding to the latency and risk in threat management. Sometimes called ‘swivel chair integration’, relying on the SOC employee to manually interface across the half-dozen security systems represents a real risk of missing a major threat. By relying on a single system that unifies all security data, SOCs – and their surrounding teams – are able to operate off the same page.
Secondly, SOCs are under heavy duress to prove their worth. Ever-stretched budgets mean that security professionals are always under pressure to do more with the same resources. XDR and SOCs are uniquely well-positioned to improve asset protection without demanding an unfair quantity of internal resources. By relieving the stress of alert overload, it also allows the SOC to support the company’s wider innovation.
One final responsibility of the SOC is coordinating with PR and communications teams in the event of a security incident. Managing external communications regarding an incident demands end-to-end visibility of how an attack unfolds. XDR directly aids this via data stacking, which correlates related events and maps them to the different stages of the cyber kill chain or MITRE ATT&CK framework tactics and techniques.
Realize Your Full Protective Potential With Stellar Cyber
Fundamentally, Stellar Cyber’s Open XDR is able to ingest every piece of security data across your organization’s attack surface – and parse exactly how each data point interacts with another. Not only does it offer a way to simplify and streamline endpoint, network, and threat information – but coupling this up with your SOC allows the team to start realizing their full protective potential.
