Protecting your organisation from sophisticated and damaging cyber threats is no easy feat. 

Not only is the cyber threat landscape growing all the more versatile, but threat actors are becoming increasingly difficult to spot, often penetrating a network or system and going months without being detected. 

Keeping up with today’s complex cyber threats involves managing highly intricate and complicated security technologies and infrastructure, which is challenging.

Allocating a cyber budget wisely

To make matters more burdensome for businesses, the recommended security budget to sufficiently protect your critical systems, networks and infrastructure is proving harder to counterbalance. In 2020, financial organisations spent 10.9% of their IT budgets on cyber security, with the insurance industry spending 11.9%. Some studies point to worryingly low budgets being allocated in healthcare and other industries.

In today’s financially gruelling times, businesses are feeling the pressure of increased costs and inflation, higher staff wage demands, and a tremendous, persistent skills shortage in cyber security. Therefore, even if your business is one of the 82% of companies that are making cyber security a high priority in their 2023 strategy, it’s wise to assume that accurate forecasting and budgeting remain constant thorns in your side.

This leads many businesses to make critical decisions as far as achieving optimal security and protection across their estates. How can they allocate their stringent budget wisely and ensure any investment - existing or new - will deliver the best return going forward? 

Detection and response tools are designed to help security teams identify, monitor, evaluate and respond to potential nefarious cyber activity. Three of these solutions, namely EDR, MDR and XDR, share similarities when it comes to their capabilities of detection and response to threat actors. 

MDR, EDR, and XDR can be valuable assets in ensuring a business retains a robust cyber security posture, but there are some key differences and benefits to note regarding each solution, which may help you when deciding which one is best for your company. 

What is Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)?

EDR is a cyber security solution that captures all activity and monitoring through endpoint devices - essentially, any device with connections to and from a network. Endpoints can include desktop and laptop computers, tablets, mobile phones, servers, IoT (Internet of Things) devices and more.

EDR capabilities include:

• Endpoint monitoring
• Digital forensics
• Endpoint log management
• Threat hunting
• Data investigation and analysis
• Suspicious activity detection, validation and alerts
• Anomaly detection and artificial intelligence

Benefits of EDR

EDR has several advantages that make it an ideal security tool for organisations. It provides accurate visibility on the state of all endpoints, which make up a large proportion of security breaches.

EDR is seen as an evolved version of traditional endpoint protection (EPP), which is a classification-based form of threat detection. EDR can essentially complete all these types of tasks automatically, as well as signature-based detection to defend against known and unknown threats like ATPs, malware and ransomware. EDR can integrate with existing SIEM platforms easily, which could save organisations significant amounts of money in the upfront costs of upgrading. 

The major downside to EDR is its secular focus on endpoint telemetry which limits the amount of data available for analysis, without any ability to detect intrusion via the cloud or the network itself, making it challenging to distinguish genuine threats from false positives.

What is Managed Detection and Response (MDR)?

MDR is a fully-managed security service that incorporates many of the benefits of EDR and XDR into a convenient and hassle-free solution, often offloaded to accredited and experienced cyber security companies. 

MDR services include a suite of outsourced capabilities, including:

• Continuous, round-the-clock monitoring and detection, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
• Proactive threat hunting
• Managed investigation services
• Guided responses
• Correlated data analysis
• Threat and alert prioritisation
• Managed remediation

MDR is often viewed as having an in-house Security Operations Centre (SOC) alternative, or SOC-as-a-service. MDR is often seen as a step above MSSP, with 79% of MSSP legacy users planning to upgrade to MDR, a recent study found.

Benefits of MDR

One of MDR’s clearest benefits is how reassuring it can be for businesses without the in-house security architecture or resources to build a robust system from the ground up. MDR provides free time for IT and security teams to focus on important activities that support business growth and strategy, leaving the time-consuming threat detection and hunting activities to an outsourced security centre. 

Managed services like this may ultimately save businesses more money in the long run, as opposed to building an in-house security team from scratch. MDR essentially incorporates EDR capabilities and delivers them as a managed solution, while also providing detailed event analysis and remediation, which can minimise damage.

The biggest drawback with MDR is that some providers don’t always offer the end-to-end solutions that many modern companies seek. 

What is Extended Detection and Response (XDR)?

XDR is a proactive solution that streamlines security data ingestion, analysis and workflows across endpoints, networks and the cloud, enhancing visibility around hidden and advanced security threats and creating unified responses. XDR collects and aggregates data across a company’s infrastructure to improve threat visibility and accelerate security procedures and lower risks.

XDR capabilities include:

• Cross-domain security telemetry
• Consolidated threat detection and monitoring
• Threat-focused event analysis
• Data search and investigation
• Centralised user interfaces
• Automated response and remediation

The global XDR market was valued at $754.8 million in 2022, and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 20.7% by 2030.

Benefits of XDR

XDR is often sought by organisations that want increased visibility of their infrastructure to minimise threats. XDR solutions generally acknowledge that endpoint detection has its limits when offering complete IT infrastructure protection.

EDR and MDR address single aspects, while XDR provides direct responses to these aspects and others, aggregating detection and response capabilities for endpoints, networks and cloud solutions into a single, centralised system. 

XDR is regularly offered as a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), consolidating all threat alerts into a single package, subsequently reducing the costs of tools and simplifying integration and deployment requirements.

Key differences between EDR, MDR and XDR

All three solutions enhance a company’s cyber security posture, by providing the following:

• Threat detection
• Data Analytics
• Incident response
• Threat hunting and support
• Data aggregation, triage and analysis

The main thing to remember about all three is that they differ in terms of area of focus and execution.

EDR and XDR are deployed, configured and managed by human operators, and their software alerts need to be reviewed by third-party tools and, ideally, human evaluators. MDR is different in the sense that it’s managed offsite, and may integrate EDR and XDR capabilities as part of its core threat detection and response services.

EDR is deployed internally on a system within a protected network. XDR can be deployed internally, but may be hosted in a different location. MDR is a purely third-party service that operates outside of the organisation’s secure network.

In summary:

• EDR is the baseline monitoring and threat detection tool for endpoints, which relies on software agents or sensors installed at these endpoints to capture data, which is then sent to a centralised system for analysis.

• MDR delivers all of EDR’s capabilities and more, delivered as a 24/7 managed service that focuses on analysing and eliminating threats with an experienced security operations team.

• XDR extends EDR to include more than endpoint protection, covering other vulnerabilities across a company’s infrastructure. XDR extends across a company’s entire security stack to enhance visibility around hidden and advanced threats.

Choosing the right threat detection and response tools

It’s clear to see that EDR, XDR and MDR provide plenty of benefits to organisations but each one is distinct and may be best suited for companies with specific security requirements. The most suitable solution will depend on what problems an organisation needs to address and evaluate.

Every organisation’s needs are different, and while cyber security is crucial, it’s essential to select a solution that provides the right level of coverage based on your risk profile.

Consider the following questions to prompt your decision:

• What does my organisation need to protect?
• How much visibility does the company need?
• Is my in-house security team equipped to handle security workloads?
• Do my team need to be upskilled to accommodate more time and bandwidth?
• What are the most vulnerable assets to my organisation? How at risk are they?
• How constrained is the organisation in terms of resources?
• Who should ideally be investigating, analysing and responding to cyber threats, alerts, and anomalies?