Understanding SOAR, XDR, and EDR: A Comprehensive Guide

Cybersecurity is full of acronyms for various solutions providing similar capabilities. When selecting a cybersecurity tool, it can be difficult to determine which of the available options is the best choice for an organization’s use case.

SOAR, XDR, and EDR are cybersecurity solutions that enhance security operations but serve different purposes. SOAR automates security workflows, XDR correlates data across multiple sources for faster threat detection, and EDR focuses on endpoint-level protection. Understanding these distinctions is crucial for selecting the right tool for your organization. 

SOAR: Automating Security Processes 

Security teams have an overwhelming workload in the form of alert management, incident response, patching, and more. Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solutions address this problem by allowing teams to automate and orchestrate various tasks.

SOAR tools integrate with other solutions and automate repetitive tasks and workflows to improve IT efficiency and reduce the potential for damaging mistakes.. Both of these factors help improve the organization’s overall security posture by enabling security teams to focus time and attention where it is needed most.

The Core Components of SOAR

SOAR systems is divided into these key components:

• Security Orchestration: SOAR integrates security tools to reduce inefficiencies and overhead from managing standalone solutions.
• Automation: SOAR solutions allow security teams to automate common activities and repetitive tasks to improve security efficiency and accuracy.
• Incident Response: SOAR can automatically respond to security incidents based on predefined playbooks to reduce response times and limit the impact of an intrusion on the business.

XDR: Integrating Security Visibility 

Security teams struggle with solution sprawl. Disconnected tools create blind spots, increasing risk. 

Extended detection and response (XDR) solutions resolve this by integrating security visibility across endpoints, networks, and cloud environments. By aggregating and correlating data from multiple sources, XDR enables security teams to more quickly and effectively identify, triage, and remediate potential security incidents.

The Core Components of XDR

XDR — whether as a standalone tool or a managed service — simplifies and strengthens security via integration. The key components of an XDR solution include:

• Data Collection: XDR solutions provide integrated visibility across endpoints, networks, and cloud environments via data collection and aggregation within a single tool.
• Analytics: XDR correlates and analyzes normalized multi-source data, leveraging contextual insights to accurately detect real threats and minimize false positives.
• Response: XDR integrates incident response, leveraging platform data for precise automation, improving accuracy, and reducing mean time to remediation..

EDR: Integrating Threat Detection and Response for Endpoints

Endpoints are prime cyberattack targets e as they host valuable data and applications. With the growth of remote work and cloud computing, these endpoints increasingly lie outside traditional, perimeter-based network defenses.

Endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions detect and remediate endpoint threats by collecting, analyzing, and acting on data. Their deep visibility helps detect advanced and sophisticated threats that other security solutions might miss.

The Core Components of EDR

The key components of EDR are similar to those of XDR but with a different focus and include the following:

• Data Collection: EDR’s data collection is focused on the endpoint, looking at log files, processes, and network activity.
• Analytics: Using the collected information and threat intelligence, the EDR solution can identify more subtle threats on the endpoint.
• Automated Response: EDR can automatically remediate threats on the endpoint, including disconnecting it from the network, terminating processes, or quarantining suspicious files.

The Difference Between XDR and EDR

XDR and EDR both provide threat detection and response capabilities, but with different scopes. XDR offers visibility and control across endpoints, network, and cloud infrastructure. In contrast, EDR focuses solely on endpoint protection.

XDR improves efficiency by consolidating security tools, while EDR k. provides deep endpoint visibility to detect subtle, sophisticated threats on that device.

The Difference Between XDR and SOAR

Both XDR and SOAR solutions use automation to tackle security challenges but differ in focus. 

XDR consolidates multi-layer visibility and automates threat detection and response for faster incident handling.

SOAR automates broader security workflows, reducing repetitive tasks and allowing teams to focus on prevention and remediation. 

How These Technologies Work Together to Strengthen Security Posture

SOAR, XDR, and EDR are all security technologies with the potential to dramatically improve an organization’s security posture. While they have similar goals and tools, they have very different areas of focus, making them complementary solutions.

When selecting a security solution, it’s important to consider the business needs and the problem that it’s intended to solve. For example:

• SOAR helps to improve efficiency and security by automating repetitive tasks to address alert overload or a large backlog of unpatched vulnerabilities.
• XDR integrates many security functions in a single solution to improve security and efficiency by eliminating unnecessary context-switching and visibility gaps.
• EDR enhances security and efficiency by providing deep visibility and automated remediation on a particular endpoint.

Future-Proof Your Security with Cato SASE Cloud Platform

While SOAR, XDR, and EDR address different security needs, they still operate as individual solutions. 
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) provides the benefits of all three solutions by converging a large suite of security capabilities within a single cloud-based solution. This improves security visibility and supports automation for improved efficiency and security. To learn more about why Cato SASE Cloud is the right solution for your organization, book a demo.