If you’re a company that works with sensitive customer data or proprietary information, you can’t be too careful about cybersecurity. Even if you’re a small business, the threat of a cyberattack is real. Half of small and medium-sized businesses suffer cyber-attacks, and 60 percent of those go out of business over it.
Extended detection and response (XDR) provides a more holistic, efficient, and proactive cybersecurity solution for businesses of all sizes. While you might not be big enough to afford a cybersecurity team of your very own, you can probably still afford to purchase a managed XDR solution from a security provider like Trend Micro, CrowdStroke, or Heimdal. Here’s what you need to know.
What XDR Cybersecurity Is
XDR brings together a suite of cybersecurity tools to provide a unified security solution that aggregates email, endpoints, cloud networks, server networks, network traffic, different data silos, and environments, so that you can see your organization’s whole security picture at once. It offers a more holistic approach to cybersecurity that protects your entire network, on the cloud and off, with a single Software as a Service (SaaS) solution.
How It Works
XDR uses machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to not only recognize known threats but to learn to recognize evolving threats as they occur. That’s why XDR cybersecurity can protect against unknown zero-day threats and it’s why XDR cybersecurity systems from providers like Trend Micro tend to get better at recognizing threats over time.
Instead of focusing on endpoints, XDR monitors your server network traffic, cloud network traffic, company-wide emails, siloed environments across different departments, and so on. Modern cyber attacks don’t depend on a user downloading infected files to your system – these days, you can get attacked just by visiting a malicious website. That’s why it’s important, in today’s threat landscape, to use a cybersecurity solution that monitors all of your network traffic, analyzes data collected from multiple layers of your network, and tracks threats from their sources based on network traffic.
How XDR Can Benefit Your Business
If your company cares about cybersecurity, you should consider using XDR to keep your data, network, and endpoints safe. That’s especially the case if you use or store private customer data, or have important proprietary data that can’t be allowed to fall into the hands of your competitors. A cyber attack could mean reputational as well as financial losses for any company, and could be difficult or impossible to recover from.
Implementing XDR cybersecurity at your business can give you more control over your company data and more visibility into the threats you’re facing and the vulnerabilities you need to deal with. You’ll be protected against known and unknown threats, since the advanced, AI-based detection tools will be able to anticipate new threats as well as protect against old ones.
If you have a cybersecurity staff, implementing XDR cybersecurity will help them work more efficiently and free up their time for tasks that only human beings can complete, since it will automate many of the processes of enterprise cybersecurity while still providing a high level of protection.
That means you can optimize your technical resources. It also means that managed XDR solutions are surprisingly affordable for companies that can’t justify the expense of a cybersecurity team. XDR cybersecurity can detect and deal with many threats without any response from a human at all, which streamlines security processes, minimizes alerts, and allows your team to focus on more complex tasks as they arise.
XDR security tools are ideal if you operate in a business environment that moves between the cloud and a local server network, because XDR offers the flexibility to protect your data across both network environments. In the event that one of your environments is compromised by a threat, XDR cybersecurity should be able to quickly detect it, quarantine it, and remove it. The interruption to your systems should be minimal, and the risk of threats spreading across your system to other devices or silos is also minimal.
If you’re looking for optimal cybersecurity that has the flexibility to protect your data across servers, clouds, a network of devices, email, and traffic into and out of the network, you need the multi-layered efficiency of an XDR system. If you can’t afford to hire a cybersecurity professional to run it for you, you can always choose a managed XDR solution for your business. It’s the easiest and most effective way to protect your company from cyber attacks.