What XDR adds beyond EDR
EDR monitors a computer. XDR monitors the connections between the computer, the account, the email, and the cloud service.
Take a typical account takeover. An employee enters their credentials on a fake login page. The attacker logs in, creates a forwarding rule, monitors the invoice flow for a few weeks, and then sends a payment request with a changed account number.
None of these steps ever touch an endpoint. EDR sees nothing because there is nothing to see. XDR sees the login, the rule, and the anomalous behavior as parts of the same incident.
Alert fatigue is the problem XDR solves
More tools mean more alerts. More alerts lead to longer response times, not shorter, because someone has to sort through them.
By correlating signals, a hundred individual alerts become a few incidents with context. This is primarily a staffing gain rather than a technical one – which is why XDR is often prioritized by organizations that don't have the capacity to keep up.
When the upgrade is justified
When your operations are in the cloud. If Microsoft 365 is the hub of your workday, that is where attacks begin, and endpoint protection alone covers the wrong surface.
When you have more consoles than you have time to open. Three separate tools that each alert correctly effectively become one tool that no one monitors.
When you need to be able to investigate after the fact. A coherent chain of events is the difference between knowing what happened and guessing.
If you have few cloud services and an environment consisting mainly of clients, a well-configured EDR combined with ITDR can be both cheaper and sufficient. We will let you know if we think so.
The tool is not the entire solution
XDR reduces noise but does not eliminate the need for someone to take action. A correlated event at three in the morning is still an event that no one reads if no one is awake.
Therefore, XDR is in practice combined with automated actions and a staffed SOC. We go through how the layers fit together under IT security.
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