Extending and enhancing threat detection and response capabilities in the face of a growing attack surface is the primary result of XDR when it comes to security efficacy. This outcome can contribute not only to comprehensive protection but also to better implementation of zero-trust security. This approach does not trust any user or any device by default and only gives access to resources that need it. To better understand what zero-trust and XDR have in common and how they can complement each other, let’s take a deeper look.

What is Zero-Trust About?

Traditionally, companies operate with the concept of “perimeter protection” when protecting infrastructure. This term means thorough inspection of any connection to company resources from the outside. A zone inside the perimeter is considered trusted; users, devices and applications have a certain freedom of action there. As long as the trusted zone is limited to the local network and stationary devices connected to it, perimeter protection is effective. However, with the growing number of mobile gadgets and cloud services used by organizations and their employees, the concept of the perimeter is now blurred.

The concept of “zero-trust” was proposed as an alternative to “perimeter protection” by John Kindervag, Forrester research analyst. He suggested not to classify resources into external and internal, and to consider all zones potentially untrusted. Under this model users, devices and applications are subject to verification every time they require access to any corporate resource.

While there is no single approach to deploying zero-trust security, there are the basic principles that allow building such a system:

Not a Perimeter but Surface Protection. This includes everything that an organization must do to protect itself from unauthorized access: Confidential data, infrastructure elements, internal applications and so on.

Micro-Segmentation. Corporate networks and other resources are divided into small nodes, which may even consist of a single device or an application. This allows users to flexibly manage access and eliminate the uncontrolled spread of threats within the network.

The Principle of Least Privilege. Each user is granted exactly as many rights as they need to perform their tasks. This way, if an individual user’s account is hacked, it may compromise some of the resources but not the entire infrastructure.

Authentication. According to the zero-trust concept, a potential threat is implicit whenever there is an attempt to gain access to corporate information. Therefore, for each session, the user must go through the authentication process and confirm their right to access the specific data needed for the task they are performing.

Total control. To effectively implement a zero-trust model, the IT department must be able to manage all work devices and applications.

Comprehensive Protection With XDR

Companies use multiple cybersecurity solutions to protect endpoints, networks and other assets from cyberthreats, and it is usually difficult to manage all these solutions simultaneously and effectively. This is one of the reasons why information security professionals can miss important security alerts or skip them, raising the possibility of being attacked. XDR can solve this problem as it aggregates and correlates data from all these multiple sources and provides a unified view of potential threats. By identifying and investigating suspicious activity across different layers of the IT infrastructure, XDR helps organizations detect and respond to advanced and persistent threats more effectively.

XDR’s greatest advantage is that it saves time, a crucial element when it comes to cyber resilience. To achieve this, telemetry is gathered with the help of machine learning algorithms and behavioral analytics. Using information from endpoint protection platforms, XDR extracts only those elements that need to be analyzed for potential anomalies and threats, simplifying and facilitating the timely analysis of potential malicious activity with unparalleled accuracy and speed. Thus, security teams can more quickly prioritize threat data by severity.

XDR’s Role in Achieving Zero-Trust Security

When used together, zero-trust and XDR provide a powerful defense against cyber threats. Zero-trust helps prevent unauthorized access to resources and applications or revoke access already granted if conditions have changed, while XDR helps detect and respond to potential threats that manage to bypass those initial access controls. By using XDR to monitor all activity across the IT infrastructure, organizations can identify suspicious activity that may indicate a potential threat and take proactive steps to mitigate the problem.

If XDR detects an unusual pattern of activity on an endpoint device, it can trigger an alert that prompts zero-trust to require additional authentication and authorization before granting access to any resource or application. This helps prevent the threat from spreading laterally within the network while XDR continues to monitor the endpoint and investigate the potential threat.

Zero-Trust and XDR, the Perfect Combination

By adopting a zero-trust approach and implementing XDR solutions, companies reduce the number of incidents and improve the effectiveness of cybersecurity teams as they face a variety of challenges, including increasingly complex attacks, global skills shortages and alert fatigue.