Security teams are facing an increasing challenge as the world moves towards distributed work environments. With a growing number of employees working remotely and dispersed across different locations, companies have had to adopt new technologies to support their workforce. This shift towards remote work has not only broadened the attack surface that security teams need to monitor but has also increased the volume of security alerts they have to handle.

Gartner, a leading research and advisory company, predicts that by the end of 2023, 71% of the US workforce will consist of fully remote or hybrid workers. This rapid transition to remote work has forced companies to rely on various technologies, including large-scale cloud platforms and individual software-as-a-service solutions, to enable their employees to work efficiently and securely from anywhere.

However, this distributed work environment has created challenges for security teams. They often struggle to gain complete visibility into all their assets and understand the true risk posture of the organization. According to a survey, only 5% of IT decision-makers claim to have complete visibility into employee adoption and usage of company-issued applications. This lack of visibility makes it difficult for security teams to accurately assess the risks and take proactive measures to protect the organization.

Fortunately, there is a solution that can help security teams address these challenges. By implementing unified extended detection and response (XDR) and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions, organizations can improve their ability to correlate and contextualize security alerts across their entire infrastructure.

XDR and SIEM solutions simplify security alerts by consolidating and analyzing the vast amounts of data generated by various security systems. With the global cybersecurity workforce facing significant labor shortages, security teams are expected to do more with less. The cybersecurity field currently has an estimated 3.4 million job openings, and 40% of security leaders report feeling at extreme risk due to these labor shortages.

The threat landscape is also becoming increasingly complex, with cybercriminals continuously evolving their tactics. Last year, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit took down 531,000 unique phishing URLs hosted outside of the company. Additionally, password attacks increased by 74% in 2022, with an estimated volume of 921 attacks occurring every second. Phishing emails pose another significant threat, as threat actors can infiltrate an entire organization within just 72 minutes after a malicious link has been clicked.

Given these challenges, it is crucial for security teams to be able to respond quickly and effectively to the alerts they receive. However, with the overwhelming number of alerts generated daily, it is unrealistic to expect human operators to handle them all efficiently. This is where XDR and SIEM solutions play a vital role.

Unified XDR and SIEM solutions help counter alert fatigue by reducing the billions of individual security signals into fewer high-priority alerts and incidents. XDR enables security teams to collect alerts from various sources, such as endpoints, networks, applications, cloud workloads, and identity infrastructure. It then analyzes and connects these alerts to help prioritize the most critical ones based on their potential impact on the organization. XDR also provides a visual representation of how attackers can move within networks, making it easier for security teams to identify and respond to threats.

SIEM complements XDR by applying advanced analytics and threat intelligence to the data collected. This helps distill the information into actionable insights, reducing the burden on security teams and allowing them to focus on the most relevant and critical alerts. The combination of XDR and SIEM also enables security teams to have a unified view of the entire enterprise’s security posture, whether it’s a multicloud, hybrid cloud, or on-premises environment.

By unifying XDR and SIEM, organizations can go beyond traditional protective controls and strengthen their defenses with advanced detection and response capabilities. Cybercriminals are always on the lookout for vulnerabilities, and it is vital for organizations to stay one step ahead by leveraging comprehensive and unified security solutions. With the increasing complexity of distributed work environments, XDR and SIEM play an essential role in safeguarding organizations against evolving threats and ensuring their sensitive data and assets remain secure.

Link na izvor