In 1790, a locksmith named Joseph Bramah created what many believed was the perfect lock at the time. So confident was Joseph that he offered an award equivalent to $25,000 today to anyone who could successfully pick it. It took 67 years, but a man named A.C. Hobbs did. Since then, a lock by itself is no longer considered foolproof, which is why businesses and homeowners alike spend so much money on security solutions to supplement those locks.
It is the same with cybersecurity today. The recognition that no “one security tool†can protect the enterprise has spurred organizations to deploy multiple siloed security solutions, leading to fragmented visibility and inefficient security operations.
These tools generate a large amount of security data that must be collected and analyzed by a security team, which is why companies began utilizing security information and event management (SIEM) systems to aggregate it all. Of course, you need highly trained, experienced security professionals in place to interpret all alerts and metric events to determine how to respond, thus creating the need for a security operations center (SOC). But even those enterprises with sufficient resources in place face real challenges.
- It takes far too long to respond to an attack using traditional security tools. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach 2022Opens a new window report, it took an average of 207 days to identify a breach and 70 days to contain it.
- Security personnel can’t keep pace with the escalating number of alerts and events that lead to alert fatigue. As a result, more than 20% of alertsOpens a new window are simply ignored.
- It takes too much time to interpret the endless number of security events and alerts, many of which lack sufficient context and rely on prescribed metrics.Â
- The high number of false positives wastes time that security teams can’t afford. According to the Orca Security 2022 Cloud Security Alert Fatigue ReportOpens a new window , 43% of IT professionals stated that 40% of their alerts are false positives.
The name of the game here is speed. According to a study conducted by Aberdeen Strategy & ResearchOpens a new window , the total time spent on detection, investigation, and recovery can range anywhere from 46 minutes to as long as 46 weeks, with the median being 59 hours. For obvious reasons, you want to be at the lower end of that curve.
It is why greater emphasis is being placed now on transitioning from “alert factories†to more automated detection and response systems. While an average of 45% of security alerts were automated in 2022, 39% were still resolved by Tier 1 technical staff, and that number tends to fluctuate across organizations. Further, automation is the area where greater strides can be made to reduce the impact of security incidents.
The Need for XDR
While there may not be that single “go-to†security tool out there, there is a better way to manage your security environment. Extended Detection and Response (XDR) is a cybersecurity approach that, when done right, unifies multiple security technologies to create a more holistic view of an organization’s security posture and eliminate the security gaps that siloed security tools inherently create. In addition, it can streamline the security operations of your organization through improved efficiency by the following means:Â
- Integrates and correlates data from multiple security layers, including endpoint, network, cloud, firewall, and email systems
- Incorporates multiple security functions into a single platform to reduce the complexity of your security infrastructure
- Correlates alerts and reporting to reduce alert fatigue
- Leverages AI to identify behavior anomalies, reduce false positives and automate remediation efforts to mitigate threats efficiently and quickly
One of the most comprehensive and flexible XDR solutions comes from Cisco. Their cloud-based solution integrates with the vast Cisco security portfolio as well as select third-party offerings, thus providing unified visibility regardless of vendor or vector. Designed by security practitioners for security practitioners, Cisco XDR delivers prioritized, data-driven insights that steer security professionals to the most impactful events without wasting precious time. Its built-in automation orchestration and guided remediation recommendations slash response times and ensure that attacks are identified, contained, and mitigated in time.
Let’s face it, the purpose of a security system is not to detect events, it is to detect threats that can become events that impact or compromise your operational environment. Cisco XDR lets you adopt a more proactive security posture that can search for the most impactful threats to your business and eliminate them.
The sheer volume of everything your security teams must monitor and protect clearly outlines the need for a new approach to security, but the growing adoption of XDR solutions is driven by more than increased workloads. There are also several current and emerging trends that are driving companies to embrace solutions such as Cisco XDR.
Cloud Adoption
Just as there is no single security tool that can keep your business safe, there is no threat-free environment to be had either. Certainly not the cloud, which accounted for 45% of data breaches in 2021Opens a new window . Your cloud resources need to be protected, and under the “shared responsibility†security model that cloud providers promote, you are responsible for protecting the assets you bring to the cloud.
Many on-prem security tools are not designed for the cloud, and those that do often lack the ability to gain visibility into the underlying layers of your cloud environment. The Cisco XDR platform provides a unified approach to secure assets in the diverse infrastructures of on-prem and cloud using the same console.
Increased Complexity of Cyber Threats
It’s not just enterprise hybrid architectures that are growing more complex — attack methodologies are getting more sophisticated too. In addition to exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities, threat actors are now turning to advanced attack methods such as:
- Fileless malware that can escape detection and leaves no last trace
- Multistage attacks that allow hackers to move laterally within a network for elongated periods to perform reconnaissance that increases the success of attack objectives
- Supply chain attacks that allow hackers to target downstream businesses and consumers
- Double extortion attacks that utilize both encryption and data exfiltration
Traditional security tools are designed for specific purposes, and while they are good at their assigned purpose, they can’t address the broad-based attacks launched on a vast attack surface. In addition, today’s complex threats constantly adapt new tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to outflank these toolsets.
These highly sophisticated TTPs can proceed unnoticed or be flagged incorrectly. By correlating telemetry data from so many sources across your enterprise, Cisco XDR can properly identify these threats and ascertain their potential impact. These events are then delivered to security teams with correlation and context to provide a more comprehensive view of what is occurring within your environment.
With Cisco XDR, your security teams are also constantly updated with the latest information about emerging threats from Cisco threat intelligence feeds.
Growing Importance of AI and Automation
Developers are feeding their organizations new innovative code and technologies through continuous integration and deployment pipelines. This means security operations need automation and AI to keep pace with DevOps. With the average cost of a data breach reaching $4.35 million in 2022, attacks need to be identified, contained and mitigated as quickly as possible to not only reduce the cost of recovery but protect brand reputation as well.
As companies grapple with cybersecurity skills gaps, an XDR platform can upskill your workforce with capabilities such as incident response automation that can isolate compromised endpoints, block malicious IPs, or disable compromised accounts. Organizations with XDR shortened their time to identify and contain data breaches by approximately one month on averageOpens a new window compared to organizations that didn’t implement it.
Remote Work and Digital Transformation
The shift towards remote work and accelerated digital transformation initiatives have expanded the attack surface, increasing the demand for comprehensive and adaptive security solutions like XDR. Cisco XDR is cloud-native and highly scalable, making it ideal for hybrid work environments and edge computing.
XDR Maximizes Your Security Posture
In the same way that a collection of all-star athletes alone will not guarantee a victory, amassing a collection of best-of-breed security tools alone will not ensure the prevention of a breach. Team players must work together using an adaptable game plan that coordinates the individual talents of each player into a collective unit.
Like a game plan that calls for selected offensive plays when a specified defensive front is observed, automated remediation tasks are implemented in response to observed behavior anomalies and deviations. Cisco XDR can provide a game-winning strategy to lift your security posture to the next level in a highly complex threat-laden world.Â
Conclusion
In today’s landscape, cyber-attacks are on the rise, becoming more frequent, intense, and intricate. Cisco XDR emerges as a groundbreaking approach to cybersecurity, introducing a new paradigm that encompasses various protective measures such as unified visibility, seamless integration of products, event correlation, threat intelligence, and automated workflows.
By addressing the deficiencies of traditional security systems, Cisco XDR closes the gaps that attackers can exploit. If a vulnerability is exposed, it can retrospectively analyze the situation and leverage actionable data to automatically restore affected systems to their initial state. Cisco XDR is a comprehensive security solution that fulfills the contemporary requirements for robust protection.