There are two trends in security today that seem to be at odds. One: Cybersecurity efforts, awareness, and technologies are improving constantly. And two: Threats, breaches, and security incidents continue to rise. Despite growing attention to the expanding attack surface and increasing attempts to implement solutions, the industry has yet to crack the combination en masse as attackers continue to eke out wins in this game of cat-and-mouse.
Perhaps the most high-powered threat tactics (AI-enabled phishing, polymorphic malware, RaaS, etc.) require the most high-powered tools to combat them. As extended detection and response (XDR) makes its way permanently onto the cybersecurity scene, there is no shortage of organizations wanting to leverage its strengths. However, given limited resources and expertise, many will not be able to due to maturity constraints. Enter Managed XDR, and suddenly those doors fly open.
Chasing a Growing Attack Surface
Today’s security challenges extend far beyond advanced exploits alone. They can be categorized into:
- Dynamic environments
- Evolving threats
- Tool complexity
- Talent shortage
Let’s dive into each.
Dynamic environments
Protecting on-premises resources was hard enough, especially given IoT, remote work, BYOD devices, and more. Add to that the complexity of the cloud (on which many security practitioners still lack proficiency), an explosion of data, public and private data storage repositories, social media and messaging apps, and rapid-fire technology rollouts that threaten to outstrip security, and you’ve got a real mess on your hands. Not to mention shadow IT, shadow IoT, shadow data, shadow APIs, the hazard of mixing IT and OT, and everything else that falls through the cracks. With every new service, application, user, and device comes additional threats, creating a dynamic risk environment in which organizations feel they can never get ahead.
Evolving threats
If one is good, 1 million is better. Now, largely thanks to Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) and generative AI, threat actors can spin out new ransomware strains, churn out new malware campaigns, and create convincing phishing emails at a rate unimaginable before. Attackers are changing and obfuscating code to evade detection, dipping into deepfakes to make BEC more believable, and leveraging a powerful underground economy that allows even script kiddies to do some real damage.
Tool complexity
In response, the cybersecurity industry has fitted out tools to match the powerful capabilities of today’s advanced exploits. Fighting fire with fire, solutions have become more focused, more in-depth, more capable of analyzing petabytes of data – and unfortunately, more confusing in the process. As we strive to keep up with the most sophisticated threat actors, we can outstrip our own abilities in the process, leaving SOCs to handle the burden of training, downtime, and day-to-day security tasks while they struggle to learn complicated new systems. The load is often more than most teams can bear, and you end up with shelfware or expensive solutions that are only partly used.
Talent shortage
Adding to these challenges is the ongoing difficulty of finding enough skilled cybersecurity professionals to meet the ever-growing demand. The shortage of cyber talent and the widening skills gap have been persistent issues for years, as every business increasingly relies on software, yet there hasn’t been sufficient talent in the cybersecurity pipeline to keep pace.
Currently, an estimated 3.9 million cybersecurity positions remain unfilled, despite the best efforts of industry (and government) to bridge the gap. At the end of the day, teams have to accept the fact that there is a massive amount of cybersecurity work and too few workers to do it. Given that adding more personnel is no longer a feasible solution, the pressing question becomes: What should we do next?
The answer is the same one that got attackers to where they are now: technology and outsourcing. Managed XDR is one of the prime ways in which defenders can combine the two in a true “fight fire with fire” approach.
Setting the Stage for XDR
The security status quo is clogged with solutions, complexity, and blind spots. They stand directly in the way of attaining vital security outcomes necessary to protect a modern digital enterprise. Those security outcomes include:
- Efficiency: Improving Mean Time to Detection (MTTD), incident response, and reporting by providing a single location for security visibility
- Comprehensive Coverage & Visibility: Spotting your assets in the cloud, finding threats across identity, APIs, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications
- Scalability: Ensuring as your digital enterprise grows, your cybersecurity strategy keep up
- Accurate and Rapid Response: Effectively coordinating response across multiple security tools within your environment
Plus, these outcomes must be achieved across all attack surfaces within an organization’s ecosystem. These include:
- Servers
- Workstations/laptops
- Cloud identities and infrastructure
- Network devices
- SaaS applications
- Cloud-native platforms-as-a-service (PaaS)
As we implement more diverse point solutions to achieve these outcomes, the problem just gets worse. A single, unified platform is needed that can improve visibility into the environment, scale as demand grows, bring together current security telemetries and technologies, and do it all in a way that’s more manageable for in-house teams – even ones with varying levels of expertise.
Why Managed XDR?
Extended detection and response (XDR) has a few key components that make it especially useful in today’s security dogfights, and those technical qualities are only enhanced by Fortra’s experienced managed component.
Let’s look at managed XDR in two halves:
The XDR platform
There’s no doubt that XDR capabilities alone do a lot of heavy lifting in achieving the security outcomes aforementioned. With an XDR platform, organizations can access the following benefits:
- Threat intelligence
- Analytics
- Machine learning
- Investigations
- Response playbooks
- Dashboards
- Reporting
- Asset discovery
- Asset inventory
- Vulnerability assessment
- Configuration benchmarking
- Open and native integrations
Armed with comprehensive visibility into:
- Logs
- Identities
- Network
- Cloud
- Endpoints
- File integrity
This is an amazing Swiss Army Knife collection of capabilities – if you have the resources to use your XDR platform to the fullest. Some organizations do. Others don’t. Or they just want to offload some additional burden and experience the benefits that come with a managed XDR approach.
The managed contribution
With an outside team of Fortra experts, SOCs not only can leverage every advantage of their XDR platform, but receive additional benefits:
- Triage
- Threat validation
- Alert enrichment
- SOC containment
- Actionable remediation
- Alert tuning
- Threat hunting
Is Managed XDR Right for You?
Before choosing a route, these questions can help you decided if a managed XDR approach is the right choice. Ask yourself:
How mature is my security posture?
For organizations with a lower security maturity (usually newer and/or smaller businesses) managed XDR can rapidly accelerate maturity by partnering with a 24/7 SOC team, a whole host of native controls, and open integrations to grow with you as your security strategy evolves. For those with high security maturity, managed XDR can augment your security strategy, taking time consuming or challenging responsibilities off your plate, giving you the freedom to focus on tactical initiatives to mature further, while guaranteeing consistent security outcomes.
Am I able to effectively manage the tools and processes in-house?
If your team is short-staffed or struggling to keep pace with daily security tasks, a managed component could help you enjoy the benefits of a fully powered XDR tool without unwanted downtime or reallocated cycles. A good XDR enables lean security teams to do more with less, and partners you with specialist security experts. Also, look at managed XDR not so much as “outsourcing” as an opportunity to get more out of your security strategy.
A managed XDR option will augment the detection and response capabilities you already have in-house and extend your reach. It will also make it easier to scale up or down as business and security needs fluctuate; what’s one call to your managed provider versus constantly hiring and firing?
Am I fully prepared to own our security controls?
While this sounds ideal in theory – why wouldn’t you? – what many companies fail to realize is the amount of responsibility that comes with 100% ownership of your enterprise’s security controls. This means your in-house staff is fully responsible for managing those controls, making sure they are maintained and adjusted as new assets come in, and ensuring they are always configured correctly. It also means that same SOC is also fully accountable for determining the context of alerts and navigating each attack surface and environment through the XDR tool, often while still in training.
There is no wrong answer; the correct answer for you depends on your current cybersecurity maturity level and load-bearing capacity, and only you and your team will know that.
As Josh Davies, Principal Technical Manager at Fortra’s Alert Logic, shared, “Security augmentation is huge because it means that you can get more out of your internal resources – whether they’re IT or security – and know that somebody is doing all of the basics and beyond that you need on a day-to-day basis to run your security program.”
With our Fortra XDR platform, we extend managed security to every layer of your environment – endpoint, network, identity, and cloud. Your team will be able to enjoy the comprehensive coverage and expanded capabilities of XDR no matter where you are on your cybersecurity journey.
