EDR vs. XDR vs. SIEM vs. MDR vs. SOAR
Tags: soar, cybersecurity, technology, detectionandresponse
Published: 2024-06-26 15:43:43

The world of Cybersecurity is buzzing with tech jargon and abbreviations. Many enterprises prefer to use newer approaches to combat the ever-evolving security risks and attack vectors. To counter threats, there are several tools and solutions including **SIEM** (Security Information and Event Management), **MDR** (Managed Detection & Response), **SOAR** (Security Orchestration, Automation & Response), **EDR** (Endpoint Detection & Response) and **XDR** (Extended Detection & Response).

**SIEM**: It is a tool that assists enterprises in identifying, assessing and responding to threats that affect businesses. It is intended to increase the visibility of the IT environment, allowing teams to respond to perceive events and security incidents efficiently through communication and collaboration. This involves identifying threats and taking action. It also offers forensic investigation and compliance reporting capabilities.

**MDR**: It typically comprises of technology, processes and people that collaborate to detect and respond to cyber threats. It is designed to provide continuous cybersecurity threat protection, detection and response. This makes use of machine learning to investigate, alert and contain cyber threats at scale. As a solution, MDR provides a proactive approach to threat detection and response and also assists enterprises to identify and mitigate threats faster, provide real-time monitoring, and respond to cyber threats.

**SOAR**: This is a solution stack that allows an organization to gather information about security threats and respond to events without any human involvement. This enables task coordination, execution and automation between various individuals and tools within a single platform. It provides a centralized platform for incident management, thereby reducing the need for manual processes and various technologies. This allows enterprises to easily plan, track and report on incident management activities, which improves the incident response times and the overall security posture. This can orchestrate and automate tasks across multiple security tools and systems allowing businesses to streamline their incident response process. It can automatically invoke investigation path workflows and shorten the time it takes to resolve alerts. According to Gartner, SOAR is a technology that comprises of security orchestration and automation (SOA), incident response, and threat intelligence platforms (TIPs). This allows security teams to investigate threats by leveraging automated threat hunting playbooks and reduce the overall mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-respond (MTTD).

**EDR**: This helps detect, investigate and respond to advanced endpoint threats. It is used as a compensation for the shortcomings of traditional endpoint protection solutions for preventing attacks. This allows customers to have full visibility into all security related endpoint activities. This is an advanced version of EPP (Endpoint Protection Platform) and helps completely thwart threats.

**XDR**: This is a security solution that aims to identify, investigate and respond to advanced threats emanating from various sources, like cloud, networks and email. It is a SaaS-based security platform that combines the organization's existing security solutions into a single security system. It collates raw telemetry data from a wide range of sources, including cloud apps, email, identity and access control, and integrates it with the data from multiple security systems to improve threat visibility and reduce the time to detect and respond to an attack. This is an evolution of EDR. XDR's capabilities extend beyond endpoint detection, it offers detection, analytics and response capabilities across endpoints, networks, severs, cloud workloads, SIEMs and many other platforms.