Cybersecurity protection lives on data from sensors and systems throughout the organization’s infrastructure. But data without any background or context only creates irrelevant noise that frustrates and distracts analysts. Without an integrated platform to correlate all that data, security teams become buried in an overwhelming amount of false alerts.
XDR is specifically designed to incorporate multiple security engines that correlate and evaluate normalized data sets stored in a lightweight data lake. With many security engines at work (including Threat Intelligence, User Behavioral Analytics, IDS, File Sandboxing, and Machine Learning-based anomaly detection), it becomes possible to correlate all telemetry. In addition, you can accurately score a potential incident within seconds by considering everything that is known about the system, asset, or account.
XDR Implementation Challenges:
Without a proper plan to implement XDR, several challenges can arise from our experience at CyFlare. For example, in some instances, relevant stakeholders (i.e., network or systems administration and IT teams) aren’t made aware of the move to XDR or haven’t bought into the new strategy.
Another issue is that systems and data sources may be improperly inventoried and processed, leading to confusion if the data should be sourced or if an API integration should be leveraged for potential response actions. Such actions taken by the XDR system include querying for more data or making policy changes.
A third challenge is the lack of regular meetings among SOC, IT management, network management, and leadership teams to discuss trends and continuous improvement actions.
Implementation Recommendations:
Here are a few actions you can take to prepare the ground for an XDR implementation and ensure that things go smoothly —
- Ensure the organization has created at least an Information Security Policy to identify the core requirements and decisions.
- Communicate early and often with key stakeholders about the benefits of XDR and how it will impact all departments and users. This way, stakeholders know the help of the XDR strategy and mutually buy-in.
- Inventory all potential data sources, including the organization’s SaaS apps, network devices, security tools, and custom applications.
- Choose an XDR provider that can innately integrate with your data sources to ensure that critical data can be sourced and normalized within the XDR platform.
- Identify what response actions are possible for each integration (connector) offered by the XDR platform. This will help determine what playbooks can be built to expedite the containment and eradication of identified threats.
- Discuss potential automated response actions with business stakeholders. Without proper communication and planning, it can cause significant disruption to the business. Well-thought-out playbooks are an essential component to leverage response actions.
If you are interested in learning more about implementing XDR, please visit our XDRaaS page and request a demo.
