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Navigating Security
in an Ever-Changing Digital World

Managed Extended Detection and Response

Cybersecurity should be a lot of things: resilient, robust, smart, proactive. What it shouldn’t be is overly complicated, disjointed, ineffective, and...Contents

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The State of Cybersecurity Threats and Cisco XDR

Evolving Threat Landscapes and Traditional Approaches to Detection and Response

In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, change is the only constant. As technological advancements make organizations more efficient, they also provide opportunities for bad actors to exploit vulnerabilities. This has led to a surge in cyberattacks, including an 84% increase in ransomware incidents from 2022 to 2023.¹ During this time businesses paid over $1 billion in ransomware payments². On average, the cost of recovering from a data breach is currently $4.5 million³. Unfortunately, the true scope and impact of these attacks is difficult to gauge, as many organizations choose not to report incidents for fear of damaging investor or client relations.

To defend against these sophisticated attacks, a patchwork of security tools is often deployed, which can become overwhelming for the teams managing them. While well-intentioned, this approach can strain even the most skilled specialists, who are already overworked and spread too thin. Running multiple security tools that do not communicate with each other results in fragmented visibility and limited context. This leads to ineffective threat detection, prioritization, and investigation since security teams may miss complex, connected attacks and cannot focus on the most important threats to their organization.

Moreover, the lack of a unified view means cybersecurity analysts must manually correlate security telemetry to understand the full scope of an attack, which can result in wasted time. Traditional detection and response solutions can overload security teams by generating a high volume of alerts that overload security teams by generating a high volume of alerts – many of which are false positives. This alert overload makes it challenging to effectively identify complex attacks and prioritize threats. This results in blind spots and prolonged response times, especially for organizations without large security or IT teams.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of your security infrastructure depends on the personnel operating it. Not all organizations have fully staffed Security Operations Centers (SOCs) and relying on individual heroics is unsustainable. Additionally, a shortage of budget and skilled resources makes it difficult to attract and retain qualified IT security professionals, which means security teams must do more with less resources.

What this means for organizations

To create and deploy an adaptable security system, SecOps teams need to have clearly defined roles and protocols. As such, organizations should look to solutions that can integrate existing security solutions and are intuitive to the teams operating them. To that end, the connective nature of Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions helps organizations mitigate threat detection and response through increased visibility of networks, cloud, endpoints, email, identity and applications, and much faster time to detection.

Cisco XDR offers significant benefits for organizations struggling with limited security personnel and increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. By consolidating and correlating data from both Cisco and select third-party telemetry sources, it provides a unified view of the threat landscape, enabling even resource-constrained teams to effectively detect and respond to sophisticated threats. This improves threat detection and response times, enhancing the overall security posture of the customer. Cisco XDR also includes AI-driven guidance and automation capabilities to provide data-driven assistance, actionable next steps, and remediation recommendations. This not only reduces human error but also accelerates response times by automating incident response and repetitive workflows.

Cisco XDR offers flexible licensing options to meet the needs of every organization.

Cisco XDR Essentials – the foundational security platform. Ideal for organizations that use only Cisco products, Cisco XDR Essentials includes full-featured native integration of the Cisco security portfolio, and additional threat intelligence from the Cisco Talos security research team.
Cisco XDR Advantage – includes all the features in Essentials plus curated integrations with select third-party tools to rapidly respond to threats, regardless of vector or vendor.
Port53 MDR powered by Cisco XDR – offers the full feature set of XDR Advantage along with managed extended detection and response (MXDR) services provided by Por53 Technologies security experts. Ideal for organizations that do not have the capacity or expertise to deploy and manage an XDR solution.