Modern organizations are always at risk from the emerging threats and nuanced techniques of attackers. With time, the threat landscape is evolving rapidly as attackers are coming up with new attacks to break modern security solutions and carry out their malicious motives.
When designing their security strategy and infrastructure to mitigate evolving threats, enterprises along with their security team often get perplexed between a sea of security solutions. The two security solutions that often confuse enterprises are XDR and SIEM as both of them extract and analyze data from different sources to identify threats.
Both the security solutions might seem similar due to overlapping capabilities but they differ in their approach and goal. The main difference between the two solutions is that XDR utilizes a wide variety of telemetry data for threat detection whereas SIEM only uses log data from different sources to find out threats.
So it becomes essential to understand the difference because it will help select the right solution and build a robust security architecture to safeguard against evolving threats. To help you out, we will take a detailed look at the comparison of XDR vs SIEM and whether XDR replaces SIEM in the current security scenario.
Without further ado, let’s dive right into the article!
What is Extended Detection and Response (XDR)?
Extended detection and response is a cybersecurity strategy or solution that collects threat data from multiple sources and combines various technologies to provide comprehensive detection, response, and remediation.
XDR goes beyond the traditional EDR by correlating input against a variety of threats from different security tools in the IT stack and performing advanced analytics to identify threats. This solution is designed to not only provide comprehensive visibility into security posture but also offer enhanced threat management through security integration.
Most of the modern XDR solutions are cloud-ready and they integrate seamlessly with the cloud environment to offer effective threat detection and response. From covering simple attacks against web servers to modern threats like ransomware, XDR from cross-layer capabilities offers protection against a wide range of threats.
Importantly, it provides users with a single console through which they can uncover hidden threats, automate complex responses, and take mitigation steps.
Purpose and Capabilities of XDR
The primary purpose of XDR is to offer a holistic view of the threat posture and enable the team to easily detect, investigate, and respond to threats that might impact the organization.
Since XDR collects data from different sources, it ensures cross-layer threat detection and effective response to advanced threats. To achieve its primary purpose, XDR solutions with numerous capabilities and they are:
Advanced Analytics and Threat Intelligence
XDR makes use of advanced analytics and threat intelligence along with machine learning to accurately identify and prioritize threats.
To uncover any hidden threat that is not discoverable with traditional tools, it implements behavioral analysis and anomaly detection on network traffic. As a result, it provides the security team with reports of malicious or unusual activities and indicators of compromise.
Improved Threat Detection
Unlike other security solutions, XDR analyzes a huge amount of data from different sources including traffic passing through the data center and the traffic between the data center and other networks.
Thus it is able to offer improved threat detection and also uncover threats already present in the network through the Zero Trust security model. The use of event data and threat intelligence makes it capable of hunting zero-day threats.
Broader Visibility
XDR offers broad visibility into your organization’s security posture by analyzing data from different security layers of the IT stack that include network, endpoint, cloud platform, and others. Thus it can offer comprehensive visibility and help in uncovering complex threats that are spread across multiple layers.
Streamlined Incident Response
An impressive capability of XDR of streamlining incident response to threats through automating the investigation and mitigation process. Security can orchestrate the response process across the security tools and endpoints which will increase the effectiveness of mitigating threats.
Micro-Segmentation
XDR solutions also come with micro-segmentation capabilities at user, application, and workload levels. Through micro-segmentation it is able to enforce consistent security policies and access control on different cloud data centers, helping in minimizing threat vectors and lateral movement.
Improved Efficiency and Scalability
XDR simplifies the investigation and detection process and helps in curbing alert fatigue by a large margin. Moreover, it prioritizes threats and provides actionable intelligence that enables security teams to respond to threats more efficiently.
XDR is delivered to seamlessly integrate with cloud platforms and offer quick deployment. Since they are cloud-based, they can be scaled up easily as the amount of data increases.
What is Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)?
Security information and event management or SIEM can be referred to as a security solution that helps organizations in collecting, analyzing, and correlating security incidents from different sources.
This solution consolidates the function and capability of security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) in one platform and helps the security team to analyze log and event logs. Thus, it not only assists the security to get insight into threats and arrange guardrails accordingly but also reports on log data.
SIEM solutions deploy collection agents across IT systems and collect logs from endpoints, network monitoring devices, antivirus, WAF, IPS/IDS, and others which are then forwarded to a central repository. This solution, by analyzing the events and logs, provides real-time monitoring, threat detection, and incident response.
Moreover, it also comes with compliance management capabilities for helping organizations comply with SOC, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOX, and others. Besides centralizing the logs, this solution uses ML and behavioral analytics to identify malicious network traffic, create contextual reports, and quarantine infected endpoints.
Purpose and Capabilities of SIEM
SIEM is a decade-old tool that is widely utilized by enterprises as it focuses on collecting logs and events from multiple sources and provides real-time monitoring and alerting. Over the years, SIEM has evolved rapidly and this has enabled the solution to expand its capabilities. Here are some of the vital capabilities of SIEM:
Log Management
SIEM offers effective log management where it collects log data from different IT systems and consolidates them into a central dataset. The central repository helps the security team analyze the log for suspicious activity and generate automatic alerts.
Widespread Data Collection
Like XDR, SIEM also collects log data, events, and activity data from varied sources that include IDS, firewalls, applications, network devices, servers, and others. The logs not only contain information regarding all the user’s activities but also system behavior.
Event Correlation
SIEM comes with the capability to analyze log data and leverage correlation processes along with statistical analysis to uncover any possible security incidents, anomalies, and malicious patterns. It leverages various rules and algorithms to correlate data and generate alerts accordingly.
Real-Time Monitoring
Through its real-time monitoring of security events, security teams through the central dashboard get a comprehensive view of the overall security posture. Continuous monitoring enables the security team to uncover threats, respond to incidents, and track activities.
Threat Intelligence
To offer in-depth context of security events, SIEM also integrates with threat intelligence feeds that provide alerts with additional context. The extra information you get through threat intelligence such as attack patterns, or block IP addresses helps in deciding responses and preparing the guardrails for the future.
Threat Detection
Threat detection is one of the highlighting capabilities of SIEM and it does it using rule-based correlation to identify threats. It also makes use of analytics techniques to uncover threats that normal tools can’t. From identifying brute force, and unauthorized access attempts to malicious activity, SIEM can uncover a varied type of threats.
Compliance Management
When it comes to compliance management, SIEM helps enterprises adhere to compliance by helping them maintain security logs for audits. It can generate evidence and reports that are needed to meet the regulatory requirements with specific industry standards like HIPAA, GDPR, and others.
Key Differences Between XDR and SIEM
Both XDR and SIEM have been designed to help enterprises identify threats and enhance overall threat management by collecting and analyzing data. Even though they have overlapping capabilities, they differ in scope and coverage. Here is a detailed comparison between the two:
| Aspect | XDR | SIEM |
| Primary Focus | XDR is focused on collecting threat data and helping with enhanced threat detection and response. | SIEM is focused on centralizing log management and enabling teams to analyze the logs for identifying threats. |
| Data Sources | XDR collects a variety of security data from diverse security layers. Its data sources include network traffic, endpoints, cloud platforms, cloud applications, email gateway, and others. | SIEM on the other hand, mainly focuses on the log data from a wide range of sources like servers, networks, devices, applications, and others. |
| Functionality | It provides threat detection, investigation, and response along with threat intelligence and analytics. | It provides a wide range of functionality including threat detection, compliance management, log storage, reporting, and advanced analytics. |
| Endpoint and Network Data Coverage | XDR covers both endpoint and network data for analytics. It utilizes EDR capabilities to analyze endpoint activities and NDR functionalities to assess network traffic. | SIEM only covers network data and analyzes logs from network-related servers and devices. It has the capability to analyze endpoint data but the main focus is network-related activity. |
| Customization | XDR doesn’t offer much customization and it is designed for TDIR use cases. | With SIEM, you can make numerous customization to different use cases. |
| Threat Detection | To perform comprehensive threat detection, this solution uses threat data, threat intelligence, advanced analytics, and ML. It also makes use of behavioral analytics and anomaly detection to find unknown threats. | SIEM generally utilizes signature-based detection and rule-based correlation to identify threats. The predefined rules are used for matching incidents and generating reports when known pattern matches. |
| Incident Response | With this solution, you get complete automation and orchestration options to respond to incidents. You can automate the response process like blocking network traffic or deploying remediation for specific situations. | This solution generates alerts and reports to help the security team to respond to incidents manually. Even though the alerts and reports are generated automatically, the response action remains manual. |
| Visibility | It provides a complete and holistic visibility into security posture. Since it collects threat data from different security layers, it is able to offer a complete view of the threat landscape. | SIEM tools offer visibility into the security logs and events, enabling the team to monitor all the activity in the network. |
| Delivery Model | XDR is designed to work with cloud infrastructure. | It can be cloud or on-premises delivered. |
| Management Complexity | This solution integrates easily with IT infrastructure and doesn’t require much effort for tuning alerts. | This solution requires a lot of effort for integration into data sources and orchestrating the threat alerts. |
Benefits and Limitations of XDR
Like every security solution, extended detection and response solutions come with its own set of benefits and limitations. Let’s begin by exploring its benefits:
Benefits of XDR
Comprehensive Threat Detection: XDR might be based on EDR but it expands its threat detection capability by sourcing and correlating data from multiple sources.
It goes beyond the endpoint and covers threat data from network traffic, cloud applications, cloud environments, and other sources, ensuring comprehensive detection of multilayered threats.
Increased Visibility: A huge benefit of XDR is that it provides a holistic view of an organization’s security posture by sourcing and correlating data from different telemetry sources. The broader visibility helps the team to uncover many advanced threats that might have gone undetected.
Cross-Layer Detection: XDR enables the correlation of threat data from multiple security layers in the IT environment and helps in cross-layer analysis. As a result, this tool can easily detect multi-layered threats that operate differently across the IT environment. The cross-layer detection further helps the security team to effectively respond to the complete attack chain rather than targeting one component.
Lower Operational Complexity and Cost: One of the best things about this solution is that it combines multiple tools from different vendors on a single platform, enabling the security team to perform activities without switching tools. The consolidation of multiple advanced tools in the platforms also makes it extremely cost-effective to operate.
Automated Response: Through automation, XDR streamlines the response action and helps in quickly remediating a threat before it can make any impact. The automated incident response also negates the requirement for manual efforts and helps in taking a proactive approach toward threat mitigation.
Better Incident Prioritization: XDR offers incident prioritization that helps the security team investigate and mitigate high-risk threats proactively. Based on the analysis and impact, XDR also suggests (sometimes automates) preventive action that aligns with regulation standards and enterprise requirements.
Limitations of XDR
Deployment Issue: Even though XDR integrates seamlessly, it gets complex while implementing them in larger organizations having different IT environments. The main challenge lies in integrating them with existing security technologies, maintaining compatibility with different systems, and configuring multiple data sources.
Privacy Consideration: XDR works by collecting threat data across the IT environment including cloud platforms, networks, endpoints, applications, and others. However, due to different industry regulations in place and to maintain customer trust, it gets difficult to configure data collection.
Integration Effort: Unlike other security tools, integrating XDR with SIEM, EDR, and other security tools can be difficult and it requires a lot of effort for customization and configuration. It gets complex to integrate XDR with existing infrastructure and requires a lot of expertise.
High Cost and Resources: Another downside of XDR is the high operation cost as it needs investment in license, hardware, maintenance, and other components. Moreover, the XDR solution comes with a high subscription cost, making it difficult for small organizations to utilize. You also have to hire skilled professionals to operate XDR platforms in an organization.
High Number of Alerts: The large number of data sources causes XDR to generate a lot of threat alerts and it gets challenging to manage and prioritize those alerts. Managing a high number of alerts can be challenging and this creates a high alert fatigue, leading to consuming high resources.
Benefits and Limitations of SIEM
Security information and event management offer a large number of benefits that make it an obvious choice for every organization. However, it is not also devoid of limitations that sometimes make it difficult to maintain. Let’s take a look at them:
Benefits of SIEM
Improved Incident Detection: SIEM solutions are able to identify a wide variety of incidents and indicators of compromise by collecting and correlating data from different sources.
It thoroughly assesses log and event data to identify malicious patterns and potential threats. As a result, analysts not only get a full picture of the security landscape but also help in detecting and responding to threats proactively.
Centralized Log Management: This solution sources and consolidates log and event data from different sections in a centralized repository. The repository helps in efficient log management by enabling the security team to store, retrieve, and analyze them, aid in investigation, and troubleshooting, and help in regulatory audits.
Real-Time Threat Monitoring: By integrating this security tool, you will get real-time monitoring of security activities and events across your network. Along with monitoring, it also correlates log data to uncover security incidents, suspicious activities, and policy violations.
Deeper Insight: SIEM also aggregates all the log data from the on-premises and cloud-based servers, applications, and databases to provide you with a deep insight into the security posture. By providing comprehensive visibility, it helps the team to maintain security across the network within the IT infrastructure.
Customization: With SIEM integrated into your system, your security team will get the ability to customize threat detection and data analytics to cater to the organization’s requirements. Moreover, your organization will also have the option to customize the dashboard so that it blends with the business workflow.
Limitations of SIEM
Alert Fatigue: SIEM correlates a lot of log data, as a result, it generates a significant number of alerts. Managing and prioritizing all the alerts gets difficult for the security team, causing alert fatigue and pushing the security team to utilize a lot of resources.
Rule-Based Correlation: Rule-based correlation enables SIEM solutions to easily detect security threats but it needs to be constantly updated. The rules need to be evaluated continuously to adapt to the new threat environment; otherwise, it would overlook many unknown or advanced threats.
Deployment Issue: SIEM is a great tool for every organization. However, enterprises have to go through a complex process to deploy them in a mid to large-scale environment. The main challenge lies in defining correlation rules, configuring the sources, and integrating the security tools. Moreover, you need a lot of expertise and resources to deploy them.
Limitation in Endpoints: Since SIEM solutions are mainly focused on the log data of the network, it has limited visibility into the endpoint. To expand the endpoint coverage, SIEM needs to integrate with the EDR solution and cover all endpoint activities.
Future Trends and the Evolution of XDR and SIEM
Since the arrival of XDR and SIEM in the industry, both security solutions have evolved significantly with the advancement of technology.
In the future, it will keep evolving to cope with emerging cybersecurity challenges and increasing security requirements of enterprises. We present to you some of the possible evolution and future trends associated with XDR and SIEM one by one:
XDR Solution
With the increasing advancement of cyber threats and the requirement of enterprises for comprehensive visibility into various security layers, the XDR solution is going to get more popular in the industry. The holistic approach towards incident detection and response and other benefits will accelerate the adoption of this solution.
In terms of evolution, XDR is evolving gradually and the possible integration with the IAM system to boost up the behavioral analytics is one of the signs. The integration of IAM will enable the XDR to increase the chance of identifying malicious activities associated with access privileges and user accounts. Moreover, it will also show deep insight into insider threats and help in improving the security infrastructure.
The advancement in security technology will also improve the orchestration and automation capabilities of XDR including automated incident response, remediation actions, playbook, and others. AI and ML are evolving with time, its integration with XDR will improve the overall threat detection and enable quicker incident response.
As more applications move to the cloud, XDR will become more cloud-native. XDR is already designed to natively work with cloud environments and in the future, it is expected to focus more on cloud. The better integration with cloud infrastructure will help XDR in better coverage and detection capabilities.
SIEM Solution
SIEM solution is expected to promote collaboration and information exchange between security teams across organizations to ensure a collaborative approach toward threat detection. SIEM will promote this collaborative approach by sharing threat intelligence among organizations and enable teams to create a robust defense against threats.
To improve threat detection and curb false positives, SIEM solution will soon start implementing advanced analytics techniques like ML and AI in the solution. The integration will not only help in improving threat identification accuracy but also help in identifying zero-day threats.
The high number of cloud adoption is also expected to bring cloud-based SIEM solutions into the market that will offer better flexibility, low maintenance, and high scalability. The native integration to the cloud environment will enable the organization to maintain optimum monitoring capability. The integration of SOAR tools will also boost security operations and lower the response time.
Does XDR Replace SIEM?
Both SIEM and XDR servers are powerful when it comes to threat detection and response efforts for an organization. SIEM is still a relevant choice for organizations that require a security solution offering log management, reports, and regulatory compliance. Plus, for organizations that are more focused on eliminating threats in their network, SIEM servers are a good choice.
However, it has been observed that many organizations are gradually shifting towards XDR solutions as they offer similar capabilities and better coverage as it correlates data beyond network and endpoints. Moreover, it is quite user-friendly and integrates well with the modern cloud infrastructure and security tools.
Final Words
In today’s cybersecurity landscape, XDR and SIEM play a crucial role in helping organizations identify and respond to threats across their IT environment. However, the two security solutions are quite distinct in their approach and focus. Through this article, we have tried to showcase the comparison of XDR vs SIEM and help your organization decide which solution they need.
FAQs on XDR vs SIEM
What is the biggest difference between XDR and SIEM?
The biggest difference between XDR and SIEM is that it takes an all-around approach to threat detection and response by utilizing artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other advanced analytics. SIEM on the other hand is more focused on log data in the network and offers only real-time monitoring and compliance management.
Do You Need SIEM and XDR?
An organization can greatly benefit by combining XDR and SIEM and enhance the overall threat detection and response approach. By integrating the XDR platform with an SIEM solution, organizations benefit from the strength of both solutions and have a collective approach to responding to threats.
Is XDR a Better Solution Than SIEM in Advanced Threat Detection?
XDR is considered to be a better option than SIEM when it comes to advanced threat detection because it utilizes machine learning, behavioral analytics, AI, and other capabilities. As a result, it is able to detect many advanced threats, zero-day threats, malicious activities, and other threats that SIEM won’t be able to detect.
Does SIEM Offer Better Compliance Management?
It is true, that SIEM offers better compliance management than XDR and it is due to the exclusive features like creating compliance, helping in audit, and maintaining logs. Moreover, it has been designed to help organizations adhere to compliance requirements. Whereas XDR doesn’t offer the same level of compliance support as it lacks in compliance-focused features.
