The Role of Open XDR in Modern Cyber Defense: Enhancing Visibility and Efficiency
5 min read
By Katrina Thompson
The world is ready for OpenXDR. But what does that mean? Extended Detection and Response platforms are already here and doing great. The key difference is that OpenXDR platforms don’t require allegiance to a specific provider – they are vendor-agnostic. And that slight difference might make all the difference in enhancing visibility and efficiency in modern enterprise ecosystems.
Find out what OpenXDR brings to the table, how it impacts current cybersecurity operations, and the ways in which it effortlessly enables both automation and resilience across the security lifecycle.
What is OpenXDR?
OpenXDR combines the best of several worlds in the cybersecurity landscape today.
- SIEM | OpenXDR extends beyond your typical SIEM, covering the network – but then covering a lot more.
- EDR | OpenXDR also detects and responds to threats on the endpoint. But again, it does still more.
- MDR | OpenXDR provides a better value than your typical Managed Detection and Response (MDR) solution because it isn’t limited to specific tools, and pricing is in your hands – not the provider’s.
- MSP | OpenXDR keeps pace as security complexities – business maturity, the need to scale, complex one-off problems, etc. – continue to mount. Comparatively, many Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are stymied by the single-vendor solutions and generic approaches they are locked into.
As the SANS Institute states, “With the maturation of XDR, the capabilities of AI-driven NDR can be extended and enhanced to accommodate endpoint security telemetry, other events within the environment, and correlation and event management tooling.”
Outcomes and Benefits of OpenXDR
TechTarget notes that the ultimate outcomes of using an XDR solution include:
- Complete visibility of IT environment and tooling
- Reduced likelihood of compromise through insights into risk
- Reduced impact of compromise through rapid detection and response to threats
In other words, OpenXDR is the ultimate combination of today’s most effective cybersecurity tooling. However, because of its AI-driven capabilities, it can bridge the gap between them and catchblind spots between the network (SIEM) and the endpoints (EDR).
Most notably, it not only has the power to aggregate data from across your enterprise, but it is vendor agnostic. It can collect this data from all of your best-of-breed tools – with no additional integration required. Then, it presents its findings in a singular view, complete with context, so your SOCs can make fast decisions.
How OpenXDR Affects Cybersecurity Operations
OpenXDR streamlines an organization’s approach to enterprise-wide security. As today’senterprises can be cloud-based, on-premises, or hybrid, each of those environments (and sometimes all) needs to be transparent to the security teams that protect them.
In the past (or currently, for most), this means assembling a host of data-catching tools (like the ones mentioned above), training your SOC to the Nth degree or hiring out (both increasingly difficult to do), and storing data separately for analysis later by those same tools – or maybe different ones.
OpenXDR is the Swiss Army Knife of the security world, making all cybersecurity operations doable from a single platform and bringing together what once was siloed apart. Now, teams don’t have to train on various solutions – OpenXDR covers them all. They don’t have to worry about getting one tool that will integrate with this and another that will integrate with that – OpenXDR streamlines the back end by simply integrating with them all.
Teams no longer need to worry about holding data aside – in data lakes, repositories,orspecific data models. OpenXDR ingests real data in real-time, directly from the environment and tools themselves, eliminating the need for bulky extra steps.
The main thing to understand is this: OpenXDR works by making better information easier to come by for busy enterprise SOCs.Instead of replacing tools, it acts as the hub. It orchestrates everything that comes in, corroborating evidence, providing threat data with context, and summing that all up in alerts that your SOC can action as soon as they come in – no more messy guesswork.
How OpenXDR Enables Automation and Resilience
Automation
OpenXDR allows SOCs to take a break from (or forsake completely) the repetitive security tasks that suck their time. Certain things must be done – threat hunting, routing investigations, checking out every alert to ensure it is legitimate, etc. However, many of those problems could be eliminated with better information (which OpenXDR provides) and AI-based technology that can sift through petabytes of traffic and spot a bad actor by their behavior alone.
OpenXDR ‘s automated processes provide companies with a way to get this done. Given the sheer volume of data organizations process daily, this would be a near-impossible task for a team of humans (even a very large one).
Resilience
NIST defines cyber resiliency as “The ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks, or compromises on systems that use or are enabled by cyber resources.” Anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt are all key phrases, and the –DR part really kicks into play here. Automated (or rather, autonomous) detection and response capabilities allow at least some part of your team to go on “autopilot” while OpenXDR guards the roost.
Without Extended Detection and Response technology, that means “EDR is guarding the endpoints,” or “the SIEM is watching the network,” only to file their findings in separate locations for the SOC or system administrator to go through, sift, sort, prioritize, validate, and investigate later.
With OpenXDR, resilience is so much more attainable because when your team gets into work, all they have to do is look at the information that’s been handily collected, aggregated, organized, vetted, andinvestigated for them and decide what to do from there. In many cases, the threat has even been autonomously blocked by the time they get in. Talk about ensuring resilience.
Conclusion
By batting down complexity and making the modern cybersecurity landscape easier to see, OpenXDR acts as more than an “extra set of hands.” Instead, it’s like a director of operations who is somehow trained on every platform, has perfect vision across all environments, and can tell you in five sentences what is wrong. In today’s confusing ecosystem, it plays an invaluable role in getting the right security first responders to the right fires, on time.
An ardent believer in personal data privacy and the technology behind it, Katrina Thompson is a freelance writer leaning into encryption, data privacy legislation and the intersection of information technology and human rights. She has written for Bora, Venafi, Tripwire and many other sites.
About Author
