XDR vs SIEM: What’s right for your business?

26 Feb XDR vs SIEM: What’s right for your business?

Posted at 06:55h in XDR by Simon Spencer

Extended detection and response (XDR) and security information and event management (SIEM) are two major solutions that help organisations protect themselves against cybersecurity threats, and are both possible options to protect your organisation. With both options being valid, it can be difficult to know which option is best for your business.

In this article, we will go over the difference between XDR and SIEM, as well as take a deep dive into some of the key features and benefits of both. We’ll then go over how you can choose the right solution for your business, as well as how we can help you get started today.

What is XDR?

Extended detection and response (XDR) is a cybersecurity solution that focuses on threat detection and response. XDR solutions tend to use a lot of different security tools and services — including security information and event management (SIEM).

An XDR platform will analyse data from across your business’ infrastructure to pick up on and respond to threats and attacks more accurately and effectively, and works as a holistic tool that gives you a centralised view of what’s happening throughout your organisation.

XDR is a tool that aims to boost your organisation’s security posture as a whole, rather than tackling specific areas — doing so by reducing the amount of time it takes to detect and respond to cybersecurity breaches and incidents.

Key Features

There are a few key features to know about XDR that will help you further understand its place within your organisation —

Unification: XDR brings together lots of different security tools to create a unified platform which uses the best bits of those platforms to form a stronger security response.
Advanced Analytics: XDR platforms have advanced analytics tools that will use the data gathered to identify malicious activity quickly.
Automated Detection and Response: Rather than having to manually find and stamp out threats, XDR does everything automatically and learns to prioritise certain threats through algorithms and new AI tools.
Continuous Monitoring and Threat Hunting: XDR platforms will monitor continuously and seek for threats, to make sure that you’re protected at all times.

Benefits

There are a few key benefits to utilising an XDR solution within your organisation —

Greatly Improved Threat Detection: XDR is the gold standard for threat detection, due to giving you a holistic view across your organisation. With this, you can more effectively seek out, detect, and respond to threats.
Faster Incident Response: With this, you can respond to incidents much more quickly, meaning that you can quickly stamp out anything that could pose a threat.
Reduced Complexity: XDR brings together and consolidates a multitude of security tools, simplifying them and letting you streamline operations without having to manage each security implementation separately.

What is SIEM?

Security information and event management (SIEM) brings together security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) to reap the benefits of both.

Security information management is the method of collecting, analysing, and reporting events within log data from throughout your organisation, whereas security event management focuses on real-time monitoring and analysis of events instead of the analysis of log data.

By bringing both of these together, SIEM provides a centralised platform for collecting, analysing, and managing your security data and events across your whole IT infrastructure.

Key Features

The key features of SIEM include —

Log collection from diverse sources: The SIM side of SIEM is all about log collection and event analysis through those logs, which are taken from throughout your organisation.
Real-time event analysis: SEM lets you analyse events in real time and use that analysis to detect threats.
Alerting and Notifications: SIEM solutions will notify you whenever a specified event occurs, meaning you can swiftly take action.
Compliance Reporting: SIEM solutions will also report on compliance to ensure that you’re meeting compliance security regulations.

Benefits

Here are the key benefits of SIEM —

Centralised Visibility: SIEM brings together data to be able to analyse and act on from throughout your IT infrastructure.
Real-time threat detection: Due to its’ SEM capabilities and alerting, SIEM can detect threats in real-time.
Forensic capabilities: Due to the nature of reporting that SIEM solutions use, you can use them to do forensic analysis and help take down threats by providing the information to the right channels.

Choosing the Right Solution for Your Business

Choosing the right solution for your business can be a tricky process, as each solution has its own benefits for different businesses. Where XDR uses tools to automatically find and respond to threats, SIEM focuses on collecting data to detect security issues and patch them.

Both of these solutions are useful and can be used together. However, the best way to know what you need is by conducting audits and strategising to work out what risks your organisation might face and how each solution can help you specifically. Generally, a combination of the two is great, but there are some unique benefits to using both separately —

Focus: Where XDR combines different security tools to find and respond to threats automatically, SIEM collects and analyses logs from various sources to detect security issues and meet compliance requirements.
Automation: XDR automates threat detection and response actions, whereas SIEM offers some automation but might need more integration for full automation.
Integration: XDR integrates with other security tools for a unified approach, and SIEM integrates well with diverse security products and systems.
Threat Detection: XDR is great at finding advanced threats across different parts of the organization, whereas SIEM detects security issues by analyzing logs and events from various sources.
Efficiency: XDR streamlines security tasks with centralized management and automation, whereas SIEM improves efficiency by centralizing log analysis and incident response.

How We Can Help

Your organisation’s cybersecurity is incredibly important, and XDR and SIEM can both provide a host of benefits to help your organisation protect itself from the threats that it may face in the future. By using either or both of these solutions, you’ll be able to ensure you stay protected.

If you’re looking to get started with XDR or SIEM and need a helping hand, reach out to us today. Our experts are here to help and will ensure that you get started on the right foot.