Endpoint protection solutions are vital for your incident response strategy because they act as the last line of defense against cyber-attacks. Keep in mind, cyberthreats have been and will continue to evolve and grow smarter and more complex. You need round-the-clock monitoring and anomaly detection to stay on top of any malicious activity. Remember, you sleep, but cyberthreats do not.

For a long time, especially when the internet was newer, antivirus was typically sufficient for warding off cyber threats as it could detect known signatures indicative of malware. Nowadays, threats like Ryuk don’t have those signatures and can easily evade your antivirus software. Unfortunately, those types of threats will continue to evolve. Your Endpoint Protection strategy must strengthen with the threat landscape. That's where EDR comes into play. It isn’t a replacement for your antivirus, in fact, many versions include antivirus, firewalls, and whitelisting capabilities all in one, making it more of an extension of your existing security. However, if your EDR solution comes packaged with an antivirus, you may remove what you already have so as not to slow down operations.  

EDR pays attention to your endpoint activity. It collects data on your endpoints, including processes, communications, and access. Through this behavioral analysis, the EDR establishes typical endpoint activity, or it identifies the baseline for “the norm.” Once it has established this behavioral base, it can more easily detect anomalies in behavior and identify which “out of the norm” behavior is categorized as malicious. Your EDR provides real-time data, and activity updates to your security team. From there, they can orchestrate a response to mitigate the incident. 

EDR stands for Endpoint Detection and Response. This comes into play once an incident has already affected one of your endpoints. The primary function of the EDR is to help identify threats and either automatically deploy a solution in response to the problem or provide you with insight so you can make a manual response.  

 XDR stands for Extended Detection and Response. This is the next level of EDR, though note that it does not replace EDR. The main purpose of the XDR is to facilitate productivity within your security teams, provide thorough threat and incident investigations, and to ultimately help your team recover from an incident faster. This is a better solution for advanced threats and can help your team achieve a higher level of security awareness.

While EDR often is reactionary, XDR proactively works with your existing security technologies to identify security threats, develop strategies to detect future threats. You can consider XDR an alternative to EDR and whether you select this option, or the latter depends on the level of security your organization needs.