With new attacks and new threats constantly on the rise, it could be said that every day is exciting in the Security Operations Center (SOC). But today's SOC teams are in the midst of one of the most fascinating and transformative changes in how we detect and respond to cybersecurity threats. Innovative security organizations are working to modernize their SOCs with the latest advancements in Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platforms. Artificial Intelligence in the Defense Effort.
XDR solutions correlate security telemetry across security domains, including identity, endpoints, SaaS apps, email, and cloud workloads, to provide detection and response capabilities in a unified platform. As a result, security teams using XDR have greater visibility across the enterprise than ever before. But that's only half the story. Combining this unprecedented visibility with an AI-powered SOC assistant empowers security teams to act with the speed they need to turn the tide on attackers.
In this rapidly evolving environment, innovative security organizations that want to confidently leverage today's AI capabilities and lay the foundation for seamlessly adopting tomorrow's innovations require a thoughtful, future-focused implementation strategy.
Even if you start small, breadth of XDR matters
Unlike traditional automated detection and blocking solutions that often rely on a single indicator of compromise, XDR platforms use AI to correlate cross-domain security signals considering the entire attack landscape to identify threats with a high degree of confidence. The increased fidelity brought by AI improves the signal-to-noise ratio and reduces false positives to manually investigate and triage. Notably, the broader the dataset the AI operates against, the more effective it is. That's why native breadth of XDR is important.
Ideally, an effective XDR strategy identifies and considers factors such as areas of greatest risk, cybersecurity maturity, existing architecture and tools, budget constraints, etc. While implementation should be phased to minimize operational disruption, organizations should also consider how to achieve the broadest XDR coverage to fully unleash the capabilities of AI.
Building an AI-confident team
The goal of AI is not to replace humans in the SOC, but to empower them. If your teams aren't confident in the tools they use, they won't be able to fully realize the value of the platform. As mentioned above, minimizing false positives helps build trust among users over time, but it's also essential to provide operational transparency so you always know where your data is coming from and what actions have been taken.
An XDR platform should give SOC teams full control over how they investigate, remediate, and, if necessary, bring assets back online. Tight integration of threat detection and automated attack disruption capabilities with existing workflows streamlines triage and provides user-friendly visibility into threats and remediation actions across your infrastructure.
Forward-thinking organizations can go a step further and consider generative AI to upskill the entire SOC team through guided investigation tools, script analysis, and query assistance.
Maintaining Threat Intelligence
Indicators of attack and indicators of compromise are constantly evolving. An effective, long-term XDR strategy addresses the ongoing need for rapid analysis and ongoing review of the latest threat intelligence. Your implementation roadmap should consider how to support the integration of timely threat intelligence and build in flexibility to scale or augment your team when complex incidents require more expertise or support.
As more organizations consider investing in XDR and AI to improve their security operations, a thoughtful, forward-thinking implementation approach will help them more effectively leverage today's AI capabilities while preparing for future innovations. After all, successful organizations don't just rely on AI to gain an advantage over attackers; they plan for the AI investments that will keep them ahead.
– read more A Partner Perspective from Microsoft Security
