It’s the acronym on many peoples’ lips, but like all relatively young technologies, not everybody knows exactly what it is or what it can do for their business. One thing’s for sure — XDR involves a strategic shift from reactivity to proactivity, because ‘wait and see’ doesn’t wash in cybersecurity. The smart money is on viewing XDR as a strategy rather than just a product.
So, is XDR just the latest tech-itch looking for a scratch, or a potential game-changer? The itches are certainly there, from the global skills shortage, overworked IT security staff, and a threat landscape that never stands still, to alert overload, disparate tools, weak threat intelligence and the expanding attack surface. IDC says XDR will be “a disruptive force, impacting sales of SIEM, EDR, SOA, network intelligence and threat analytics platforms, as well as providers of external threat intelligence”1 , and Forrester believes that differentiated XDR technology “will supersede endpoint detection and response (EDR) in the short term and usurp SIEM in the long run”2.