COMPARING ENDPOINT SOLUTIONS: EPP VS EDR VS XDR
There is continuous development in endpoint solutions. Instead of using antivirus alone, organizations are now opting for full endpoint detection and protection solutions. While it's exciting to know that there is a wide range of endpoint solutions available out there, it can be confusing to know which ones suit your company best.
Read on and get to know these endpoint solutions more.
ENDPOINT SOLUTIONS: EPP
An Endpoint protection platform or EPP is among endpoint solutions that cover the four cybersecurity functions:
- Predict
- Prevent
- Detect
- Respond
It's designed to replace the basic prevention solutions, such as anti-virus and anti-malware, which are typically only effective to a few degrees against known threats. This is made possible by leveraging artificial intelligence to increase your network's capacity to prevent unknown or zero-day attacks, as well as fileless attacks that don't even have signature-based footprints.
While this solution is deployed on endpoints, it can typically have a cloud-based feature that can gather data, evaluate it, and provide easy access to security analysts.
EPP identifies attacks using several methods:
- Matching malware and other file-based threats by using databases of known signatures
- Utilizing blacklists or whitelists to block or allow applications, URLs, ports, and addresses
- Testing suspected threats through sandbox-like executables
- Keeping track of anomalous or suspicious endpoint activities through behavioral analysts and machine learning
ENDPOINT SOLUTIONS: EDR Security
When a security incident has already happened, EDR is the solution you can count on. It stands for endpoint detection and response, which means it's used to analyze and respond to hills and hazards.
There are elements in an endpoint protection platform that are passive, which typically functions to prevent endpoint solutions breaches. EDR, on the other hand, is one of the active endpoint solutions that can help determine attacks and prompt automated solutions or manual responses.
Basically, EDR takes care of threats that have surpassed your existing security's prediction and prevent functions.
Here are some of the major roles of EDR tools:
- Combines data acquired from endpoints with threat intelligence to help analysts identify indicators of compromise or IoC
- Provide real-time notifications on security incidents
- Unifies forensics and analysts to efficiently evaluate affected endpoints and determine the original source of an attack
- Automatic resolution by isolating, wiping, or reimaging an endpoint
ENDPOINT SOLUTIONS: XDR
XDR stands for advanced detection and response. Giving a new meaning to endpoint solutions, it is designed to automatically gather and connect data from various endpoints, as well as many other parts of the IT environment.
It also provides an overview of the cybersecurity of your entire IT network in one unified interface and integrates security data from systems, such as:
- Security information and event management or SIEM
- EDR
- Network analytics
- Identity and access management or IAM tools
XDR's ultimate goal is to help organizations improve the productivity of their security departments, allow for faster and more comprehensive investigations, and minimize incident response times. Not to mention that it can provide more streamlined security operations with consistent and reliable evaluations in any environment.
However, XDR solutions may also come with a few disadvantages. While it may have well-founded knowledge of security technologies from the same vendor ecosystem, it may not have the same analytics capacities for data collected from systems by other vendors. In short, using XDR technology could lock you into a certain security technology ecosystem alone.
As long as your company is on a single-vendor approach, this may not be an issue. But if you are taking a best-of-breed strategy, you may want to consider whether the augmented analytical value of an XDR solution is enough to make you rely on a specific security vendor.
These three major endpoint solutions should not be used as separate or alternative strategies if you really want to have fortified cybersecurity. While XDR is widely considered the future of endpoint solutions, you should still take advantage of reliable EPP and EDR that can all go hand-in-hand together.
What to Look for When Choosing the Right XDR Platform?
The use of a dependable XDR solution allows you to get more value from your existing investments in other endpoint solutions.
A good XDR offers the following capabilities:
- Enhanced detection and response to day-to-day security incidents
- The Heightened overall productivity of your security teams
- Minimized total cost of ownership or TCO of your current security stack
As such, there are several factors to take into consideration when looking for an enterprise XDR solution. This includes:
- Integration complexity
- Time to integrate
- Degree of automation
- Operational complexity
- Holistic solution
- Cost
So if you're on the hunt for a top-notch XDR solution, look no further than Xcitium. As one of the pioneers of XDR technology, we can provide you with a solution that has the following benefits:
- Covers all stages of an active breach
- Has endpoint agents to safeguard and analyze endpoints
- Network probe for network traffic analysis
- Cloud connectors to gather various events from multi-clouds
- Analytics and investigation platform to integrate all data
- A security service layer to support 24/7 SOC and threat-hunting services
