For midmarket IT teams, securing endpoints can feel like a game of Whac-A-Mole, with more devices per user, more tools and more alerts. Each of these adds complexity, but with fewer hands on deck to manage everything effectively.
Companies juggle an average of 10 unique endpoint management and security tools, often with overlapping functionalities that create redundant alerts and siloed response workflows. That’s a serious burden for lean security teams — even though they face the same threats as large enterprises.
Consolidating security data with XDR
The challenge is real but, fortunately, it’s not insurmountable. Extended detection and response (XDR) tackles the problem by bringing comprehensive visibility across the entire tech stack.
The goal of XDR is simple: Reduce tool sprawl, and centralize visibility. Instead of manually analyzing logs from multiple tools, teams see a single console, a single source of truth and a clearer view of their security posture. By correlating telemetry across sources, analysts get context they might otherwise miss if they’re tracking multiple point tools and trying to make sense of myriad event logs manually.
Nonetheless, as with any other platform-based approach to security, full integration of XDR across the tech stack is a journey rather than something you can do in a day. That’s why it’s important to start by integrating your most critical data.
As R Greenwood of Palo Alto Networks put it, “Ideally, you want to integrate all of your data sources, but if we’re prioritizing, endpoints have to come first, because everything touches the endpoint. Your firewall data is a close second, and identity data is very quickly behind that, because that helps you tie it back quickly and easily to a user.”
Building a unified view, step by step
If aggregating your security data sources is the first step, then making sense of all that information is next. That’s another area where more sophisticated XDR solutions excel, by introducing advanced analytics and incident scoring.
To truly address the problem of alert fatigue — and its many undesirable consequences — analysts also need alerts that make sense. “With Cortex XDR, when alerts come in, we turn them into cases. Then we provide a score to help you really understand how critical a case is and why it’s important,” R Greenwood said.
The goal is to reduce noise by grouping alerts into a single “case” or “storyline” using deep analytics. Without XDR, manual analysis typically involves investigating multiple low-level alerts from different sources, such as malware scanners, firewalls, and cloud security tools.
However, analysts can get overwhelmed if they investigate all alerts and their corresponding event logs in isolation. On the other hand, when your XDR provides a complete picture of a potential attack, it’s much quicker and easier to investigate and triage the incident.
Smarter security management, made simpler
XDR is the backbone that rationalizes point tools, rather than being another console analysts need to worry about. By mapping existing controls to a common data model, assigning clear ownership and investigation workflows, XDR becomes a comprehensive system of record for all security incidents.
Start with your endpoints and then add firewall traffic and identity so every event ties to a specific user and device. That way, you can keep what works, eliminate duplicate effort, and establish a consistent way to investigate and report — all while reducing alert fatigue and improving your security posture.
For organizations struggling with tech sprawl or alert fatigue, Cortex XDR offers a way to automate detection and response and adopt a more consolidated approach to endpoint security — without the wholesale replacement of your tech stack.