BRINGING HARMONY TO YOUR SECURITY SOLUTIONS: MEET CISCO XDR

Cybercriminals take aim at companies from all directions. While your investigating a firewall alert, for example, it could happen that you lose sight of your e-mail security. Keeping this in mind, Cisco launches a new solution in July: Cisco XDR. We’re proud to announce that Avit is the only Dutch partner involved in the beta program. This makes it possible for us to tell you more about this tool and how we’re going to integrate in our own services.

It’s understandable that organisations want to have the best security solutions. After all, they can’t afford any downtime and their data have to be protected carefully. The choice for a certain firewall or e-mail security solution can depend on, for example, the reviews by a highly regarded source like Gartner. This often leads to working with a combination of tools from various brands, which creates the risk that they won’t exchange any information with each other. The result: blind spots, which cybercriminals of course like to exploit. In other words: security is a hot topic that’s bigger than all those separate tools and brands.

PRIORITISE AND CONNECT THE DOTS

To make the importance of an overarching security concrete, we’ll have to take a look what happens when you deal with a cyber threat. Most attacks follow a certain pattern. There are often already subtle hints of what’s happening: you see that there are problems with your firewall and your network connection. You also notice deviant behaviour from a certain user account. All those things together point at an on-going attack. By taking the right measures you can repel it, but you’ll of course have to be aware of what’s happening.

What makes things more complicated is that especially bigger organisations have to deal with hundreds of such events. This doesn’t only make it hard to connect the dots, but also to prioritise. If you have fifteen current alerts, which one will you respond to first? If there are comparable notifications about various parts of your network, which one will you look at first?

Luckily, you can rely on Cisco XDR: Extended Detection and Response. This system works seamlessly together with other security components, whether they are made by Cisco or not. At the launch, there are over ten integrations available for third-party solutions. More are to follow. The big perk is that those tools, all with their own areas of expertise, work together in harmony. All information (Extended) from those separate security tools are brought together, which helps you not only to see what’s happening (Detection), but also to immediately take action (Response). A big advantage: thanks to the portal, you don’t have to log in on separate management interfaces.

AN EXCELLENT CHANCE FOR YOUR CYBER SECURITY

Another benefit: there’s no longer a need to have in-house experts for all those tools. One general security expert is enough. They’ll receive notifications with appropriate advice, so they can take action, on the basis of a kind of checklist. You don’t need to know what product or service is exactly doing what, because the solutions are managed by XDR. As soon as the incident is solved, you can research what caused it. This makes you more resilient to new attacks.

At Avit, we’re busy getting to know this new security tooling, so we’ll be ready in July to offer it as a service. Except that it’s financially beneficial, this is also is a great opportunity for outsourcing your security. You could let our security operations centre (SOC) manage your XDR, to help them monitor your security and solve problems 24/7. This way, you’ll have to worry a lot less about your safety and resilience.

Want to know more about Cisco XDR? Then contact us for more information and personalised advice.