Innovation Heroes: XDR will help you defeat cyber threats

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Bad actors are getting more sophisticated, and attacks are increasing at an alarming rate.

If you work in cybersecurity, you’ve heard this before. But the situation might be worse than you think. Between 2021 and 2023, data breaches rose by 72%, and studies indicate that over 60% of businesses experience a cyber incident each year. Luckily, there’s a way to fight back.

Extended detection and response (XDR) is revolutionizing cybersecurity by unifying traditionally siloed security products into a cohesive, seamless solution. In this episode of Innovation Heroes, host Ed McNamara speaks with Briana Farro, Cisco Security’s Director of XDR Product Management, who’s arming businesses in the war against cyber threats.

The limitations of legacy cybersecurity

Traditionally, cybersecurity solutions have been siloed and lacked a comprehensive, unified view.

As Briana explains, “You were really looking at protecting a perimeter that was defined and stationary. You had locations, you had a finite number of physical locations… And then you would put physical appliances in place to defend those environments like firewalls and then progress to intrusion detection systems, and then intrusion prevention systems.”

This traditional approach, also known as endpoint detection (EDR), focused on perimeter security and proved insufficient to handle the complexities and interconnectedness of modern IT environments.

The shifting sands of the cybersecurity threat landscape

The cybersecurity threat landscape has fundamentally shifted, rendering traditional EDR solutions inadequate. Protecting your perimeter by monitoring network-connected devices like phones, computers, and IoT devices won’t cut it anymore. The rise of cloud computing, serverless architectures, and the proliferation of interconnected devices have created an exponentially larger attack surface, requiring a fundamentally different approach to security.

Briana warns that “…an organization needs to have visibility into all of those things… and helping an organization that went maybe 10 or 15 years ago from getting 10 alerts a day on a busy day or even 50 when they were being attacked to thousands of events a day, even in a smaller environment. I need to have something putting that information together for me.”

The “something” is an AI-infused XDR security system.

XDR: Revolutionizing security with holistic visibility and correlation

XDR correlates data from endpoints, networks, clouds, and more to provide a comprehensive view across security domains. This unified perspective helps IT teams see security events in context, allowing them to identify and prioritize threats that individual security tools might miss. Additionally, XDR significantly improves the efficiency of security operations, enabling security teams to respond more effectively to threats.

“[XDR is] the whole package in order to really understand what’s happening in an environment,” says Briana.

Briana points out that XDR allows businesses to “move away from the endless investigation,” and “instead spend their time remediating the most critical incidents… quickly and efficiently.”

Cisco’s open and hybrid XDR: A collaborative approach to security

Cisco’s approach to XDR stands out for its open and hybrid nature, recognizing that a one-size-fits-all solution isn’t ideal for every organization.

Briana says, “We have recognized and noticed that organizations have spent a lot of time in the solutions that they’re purchasing, and they have already implemented those. They have a knowledge base that’s built up on those. So it’s unrealistic to expect any organization to just transform and go all in on one vendor, just because.”

Cisco’s open and hybrid model allows for seamless integration with third-party products, giving organizations flexibility to incorporate best-of-breed solutions. This collaborative approach maximizes the value of existing infrastructure while adding the powerful capabilities of XDR, ensuring a more robust and adaptable security posture.

Listen to the full conversation here. You can also find episodes on SHI’s Resource Hub, Spotify, and other major podcast platforms, and on YouTube in video format.

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