The pace of cybersecurity evolution accelerated over the past decade. What was once perceived as a box-ticking exercise became a business enabler. The main driver for this paradigm shift is the massive increase in the number and severity of cyberattacks on organizations, including small and medium-sized businesses.

Typically, point cybersecurity solutions help organizations with both detection and response. Solutions such as EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response), NDR (Network Detection and Response), and SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) help organizations to identify cybersecurity events and find ways to minimize their impact.

Both EDR and NDR focus on one attack vector. As their names suggest, EDR performs threat detection and response on endpoints and NDR on networks. While they provide in-depth visibility of endpoints and networks, they lack visibility beyond that. Because of that, security teams have to operate EDRs and NDRs in a siloed manner and painstakingly find ways to integrate insights derived from them with the rest of their security stack. In essence, EDRs and NDRs do not provide a single pane of glass, a factor increasingly prized in the modern SOC (Security Operations Center), and instead create “swivel chair” security operations that are undesirable.

On the other hand, SIEMs have the inverse problem. SIEMs are responsible for collecting log data from a wide range of sources, including EDR and NDR. Although SIEMs have a broad reach, the log data they gather is shallow, and only provides limited insight. Although, the market offers many detection and response tools, but they lack full visibility, breadth of integration, insight generation, and simplification. In response to this supply-demand gap, the industry developed a new approach called Extended Detection & Response or XDR.