Is XDR Overhyped?

As security teams strive to get the most out of as many shreds of collectible security data as they can — detecting and responding to threat signals with as little trouble as possible — the category of extended detection and response (XDR) is gaining steam. It’s still early days for this growing niche, with a lot of interpretations of what XDR even is.

The foundation starts with XDR centralizing telemetry from security tools not just across the network but other key areas, like endpoints, cloud, and identity. The secret sauce tends to be what XDR does next with the data, using machine learning and threat intelligence to correlate the data and contextualize all of the different data dimensions against one another and against risk scoring to provide speedier and higher fidelity detection with less legwork from analysts.

Experts say the promise of XDR is that it makes good on unmet security promises, like security information and event management (SIEM), accelerating how security teams detect, investigate, and remediate threats. Sounds great — and suspiciously like hype to all those cyber cynics out there. So we asked a number of security experts whether they think this category is overhyped and what buyers should keep in mind as they mull over their XDR options.