Does your organization have adequate protection against cybersecurity attacks? As the threats from hackers evolve – increasing in sophistication, volume, and speed – so must your security solutions and strategy. Any discussion on solutions for identifying and dealing with threats and attacks features three topics:

  1. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
  2. Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
  3. Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

These will, no doubt be familiar. But given the propensity of security vendors to seek ever increasing degrees of differentiation, the MDR/XDR/EDR solutions market is no stranger to hyperbole and jargon, which can generate confusion.

If you’ve ever wondered what each of these solutions offers, and what the key differences are between them, this blog post is for you.

Here’s everything you need to know about EDR, XDR and MDR.

 

What is EDR?

Endpoint detection and response (EDR) is the baseline monitoring and threat detection tool for endpoints, and a popular starting point for the ‘technology’ piece of the people, process, and technology triad, which is at the heart of every cybersecurity strategy. EDR collects data from endpoints (physical devices connected to a network system) to be analyzed for threats and anomalies. EDR also offers security integrations with other solutions.

EDR acts as a failsafe for when threats have evaded firewalls, access controls, traditional antivirus software and other preventative solutions. But the challenge of EDR is that it is limited to endpoints and doesn’t provide visibility into the rest of your IT infrastructure.

What are the benefits of EDR?

Studies have shown that endpoints are the starting point for approximately 90% of successful cyber attacks and as much as 70% of successful data breaches, so protecting this element of your IT network is absolutely essential.

Although limited in terms of network visibility, EDR is still the ideal technology foundation for organization’s that are in the early stages of developing their cybersecurity strategy, or for smaller organizations with more basic IT infrastructure.

 

What is XDR?

Unlike EDR, Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions provide comprehensive visibility of your entire network. Instead of having to implement multiple, siloed monitoring systems for the various elements of your network, XDR allows security teams to monitor, investigate and respond to threats from a single software solution.

XDR works by collecting data from across the network, correlating data to automatically detect threats, and prioritizing those threats based on severity, either triggering automated workflows or providing security teams with the information necessary to triage and resolve issues.

What are the benefits of XDR?

EDR solutions alone are not enough to protect more mature IT infrastructure, as they don’t monitor key aspects of a network, such as email clients, cloud applications and servers.

While multiple solutions can be used to provide threat analysis on all of these elements and connected together by security integrations, XDR leverages AI and machine learning to deliver holistic coverage of your network and provides a number of benefits, including greater efficiency of resolving threats, real-time monitoring and threat prioritization.

 

What is MDR?

Standard Managed Detection and Response (MDR) combines EDR and SIEM solutions provided ‘as a service’, meaning that organizations can boost efforts to mitigate, eliminate, and remediate threats with external security experts who can act as an extension of their own security teams.

And next-Generation MDR, provided by cybersecurity specialists like Kudelski Security or a general managed security service provider, is essentially MDR enhanced with XDR capabilities.

What are the benefits of MDR?

MDR can provide  the protection and benefits of EDR and XDR solutions and releases you from managing your organization’s cybersecurity technology solo, in-house.

Protecting your organization from cybersecurity threats is obviously critical;it requires a significant investment of time and resources to get it right – 24/7.

For small-to-medium sized organizations this is a major challenge. SMEs often don’t have their own in-house IT team and, even when they do, they may lack the expertise or time to fully manage the cybersecurity strategy  as well as day-to-day IT management activity.

Although large organizations might have the resources to build a large in-house team, they also have significantly larger and more complex networks.

MDR services relieve an organization’s security teams of the complexity of managing security technology, allowing them to get on with what they do best: supporting transformation to optimize business and servicing their own customers.

With decades of experience delivering cybersecurity solutions for our clients, Kudelski Security can protect your organization from threats to your network. Our first-class MDR service offers:

  • MDR ONE Resolute, a turnkey, scalable MDR solution built on XDR architecture and analytics platform, FusionDetect™
  • A bespoke 24/7 service
  • Our Proprietary Threat Navigator and Resiliency Guidance tools
  • An expert cybersecurity incident response team (CSIRT), integrated into the MDR operations.
  • An intuitive client portal that gives direct access to threat detection, response activity and business-critical metrics.

To find out more, simply get in touch with our team via the contact form today.

Was this article helpful?