In recent years, cybersecurity has become increasingly complex for organizations. The traditional security stack consisting of firewalls, virtual private networks, endpoint protection, and other point solutions has led to too many vendors and products that don’t work together. This complexity leaves gaps in protection and makes it hard for security teams to get a unified view of their environment.

Two emerging technologies – Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) – are helping organizations consolidate and simplify their security. SASE and XDR take a platform approach that integrates multiple security capabilities into a single cybersecurity services solution. This consolidation provides several key benefits. Anti-Dos will shed light on these benefits in this article.

How SASE and XDR Help Consolidate Cybersecurity?

Reduced Vendor Sprawl

Most organizations today use security products from many different vendors. A 2020 survey found that the average organization uses solutions from 45 different security vendors. Managing this complexity takes significant time and resources. It also often leads to products that don’t integrate well, leaving dangerous security gaps.

SASE and XDR reduce vendor sprawl by integrating multiple security services into unified cloud platforms. For example, a SASE provider might offer software defined wired area network, firewalls, secure web gateway, cloud access security broker, and zero trust network access in a single solution. Extended detection and response condenses endpoint, network, and cloud security onto one analytics platform. This consolidation allows organizations to retire multiple stand-alone products in favor of integrated platforms.

Improved Visibility and Analytics

The multitude of security tools most organizations use today generate reams of data but lack centralized visibility. Without a way to correlate insights across products, it’s challenging to understand threats and identify critical risks.

By uniting security capabilities, SASE and XDR provide improved analytics and visibility. All the telemetry and alerts feed into a single dashboard that security teams can quickly analyze. Machine learning models in SASE and XDR also get more data to better detect advanced threats missed by individual tools. The enhanced visibility decreases mean time to detection and response.

Operational Efficiency

Managing all the different security vendors and products organizations use now requires substantial operational overhead. IT teams spend lots of time ensuring technologies stay updated, renewing licenses, and managing support contracts.

Consolidating security onto SASE and XDR platforms streamlines operations. With fewer vendors to manage, IT workload reduces. Security teams also gain one set of policies and configurations to define instead of many. New sites and users can get up and running faster by simply connecting to the SASE or XDR platform. The operational efficiency frees security staff to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Cost Savings

The multitude of security vendors most organizations use leads to significant licensing and support costs. Research shows that typically 30% of security budgets goes unused as organizations over buy overlapping products.

SASE and XDR enable organizations to retire multiple stand-alone security products, avoiding those overlapping costs. Going from many vendors to one consolidated platform also reduces vendor management expenses. The built-in automation in SASE and XDR also lowers manual work needed for monitoring, maintenance, and reporting. Organizations can realize substantial cost savings even as they get expanded security capabilities.

Reduced Business Risk

The complexity of managing many disparate security tools inherently increases business risk. Similarly, DDoS attacks or other cyberattacks exploiting vulnerabilities in software tools can disrupt your business. That is why it is important to hire the best DDoS protection services. It’s hard for organizations to be confident they have adequate coverage when they have visibility gaps across so many products. Excess vendors and licenses also raise supply chain vulnerabilities.

Consolidating through SASE and XDR reduces an organization’s business risk profile. The integrated platforms close security holes by unifying capabilities that used to operate independently. With centralized visibility and analytics, organizations gain assurance that nothing gets missed. Relying on fewer vendors also decreases supply chain risk and exposure to outages.

How SASE Consolidates Security?

SASE platforms integrate network security and access connectivity into a cloud service. 

Key capabilities provided include:

SD-WAN: 

Software-defined Wide Area Network replaces traditional routers with an intelligent cloud service that optimizes network performance.

Firewall-as-a-Service: 

Cloud-delivered network firewalls implement identity-aware policies at network edges.

Secure Web Gateway: 

Cloud proxy-based security for web traffic, including URL filtering, malware prevention, and data loss prevention.

Cloud Access Security 

Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) help you gain visibility and control over cloud app usage and data security.

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA): 

Identity/context-based network access control for users and devices.

By combining these services onto a unified global cloud platform, SASE delivers integrated security and connectivity. Organizations consolidate their security stack and operations through the SASE vendor’s centralized management console.

How XDR Consolidates Security?

Extended detection and response provides integrated detection, investigation, and response by ingesting and correlating data from diverse security layers:

Endpoint Detection and Response: 

Collects endpoint activity and events such as process, network, user behavior etc.

Network Detection and Response: 

Ingests network metadata, traffic logs, and threat intelligence.

Cloud Security Posture Management: 

Gather configuration, activity, and anomaly data from cloud infrastructure and workloads.

Identity Threat Detection and Response: 

Analyzes identity and access management system logs.

The Extended detection and response platform uses advanced analytics across this consolidated data to uncover sophisticated threats that evade individual tools. Security teams get a unified investigation and response workflow via the extended detection and response console for increased efficiency.

Extended detection and response reduce vendor sprawl by replacing multiple EDR, NDR, and SIEM solutions with a single platform. Organizations consolidate their detection, investigation, and hunting onto extended detection and response leveraging its broader data and analytics.

Realizing the Benefits of Consolidation

Transitioning to consolidated SASE and XDR platforms brings significant benefits but requires careful planning. Organizations should:

• Audit their current security stack to identify overlap and gaps to address with SASE/XDR.

• Evaluate SASE and XDR providers based on integration breadth, analytics maturity, and flexibility.

• Plan a phased migration starting with limited pilots before full rollout.

• Provide training and guidance to security teams on effectively leveraging the new platforms.

• Develop metrics to track benefits around visibility, operations, costs, and risk reduction.

How are you using SASE and XDR in conjunction? Share it with us in the comments section below.