Securing a new world of work – the future of XDR

Robust cybersecurity has never been more important than now, with organisations racing to cloud and hybrid environments that present new challenges. Devices from different locations now connect to corporate networks at a pace faster than we have ever seen, and these unscreened elements are within arm’s reach of sensitive data and the machinery of business. As the region makes headway towards economic recovery, enterprises cannot afford the downtime and cost associated with a cyberattack.

However, busy stakeholders who adopted the cloud or hybrid working models so quickly may be put off by the time commitment required to comb through dozens of siloed security solutions to identify several of those to secure their environments – endpoint, server, cloud, messaging, network, mobile, and so on. Fortunately, there is a tool that can protect all these elements from a single console. It has only been three years since extended detection and response (XDR) charged onto the cyber battlefield. Leveraging the success of EDR, XDR proved itself to such a degree that Gartner ranked it at number one in its top security and risk trends for 2020.

XDR’s winning formula is a shift away from the traditional layered cybersecurity approach and toward a paradigm that substitutes several point products with a single, integrated solution. True native XDR enables enterprises to identify and prevent intrusions by analysing and responding to the contemporary threat landscape effectively. Endpoints, servers, cloud, messaging, networks, mobile, and more are all covered, with telemetry and activity data to back it up.

Native XDR’s approach to detect complex cybersecurity attacks , especially when it comes to zero-day ones, allows it to drastically reduce the number of false positives. This is of utmost importance to today’s IT and security teams, who have become beleaguered by intense workloads. As SOC alert fatigue subsides, the team’s productivity increases. With XDR, those teams receive a prioritised view of high-fidelity alters across their organisation. From effective analysis to clear contextual view of threats, and from blocking more attacks to reduced time to detect and contain threats – a major security transformation takes place within the enterprise.

The future of XDR will require retaining and enhancing the things that made it so successful. But we must also leverage elements such as telemetry, analytics, machine learning, AI, and advanced correlation engines to create something even greater. And that’s what makes a security partner unique, that provides enterprises with not just a solution, but a platform built using DevSecOps practices, which will allow its architecture to be flexible and adapt in a continuous update cycle of new apps and tools.

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This platform would adapt limitlessly to detect new threats and protect future enterprises that have needs we cannot yet envision. In the hybrid-work future, for example, vulnerability management will be critical, as most cyberattacks still depend on exploiting old, unpatched vulnerabilities. The extensibility of XDR allows a tool to be deployed as part of the integrated platform, and updated as needed, so that future needs are always fulfilled.

Getting ready for the future is not a new concept in the GCC. We have a tradition here of reaching for the next horizon. The approach of protecting the business by adopting XDR and planning for what’s beyond XDR will protect enterprises on their journey ahead.

Assad Arabi is the managing director at Trend Micro Gulf Cluster