Top Benefits of Managed XDR for Businesses

Cybercriminals don’t keep office hours, which means that they can start their attacks in the early hours of the morning, over weekends and during holidays when there is less chance of being detected. 

This unfortunate reality has created a demand for 24/7 coverage with experts on hand, ready to assist with security alerts and potential breaches. Managed XDR is a solution that combines human expertise with advanced defensive technologies to deliver an enterprise-grade solution that protects your organization and all its systems. Understanding the key benefits of this service is important for IT managers and security architects who must decide on their next security investment.

Managed XDR merges two well-known approaches within security, creating a comprehensive line of defense. It combines Extended Detection and Response (XDR), which is responsible for providing the technological backbone of threat detection and alerting, and Managed Detection and Response (MDR), the human layer that provides security expertise and real-world experience.

When combined, the result is an end-to-end threat management service that is constantly alert and working to keep your systems safe, even when your teams are not in the office. 

24/7 threat monitoring & response

As mentioned above, many businesses are targeted on holidays, over weekends and during off-hours when detection and response times may be slower. At such times there is likely to be less resistance to an attack.

Managed XDR solves this problem by providing a security operations center (SOC) team that uses a follow-the-sun approach. The result is expert supervision around the clock, ready to respond immediately. The alternative is for businesses to build teams with 24/7 coverage of their own, which is prohibitively expensive for most businesses. 

Holistic visibility across environments

Organizations often operate across a fragmented mixture of IT environments, which creates blind spots. If your security teams only have endpoint visibility, for example, they risk missing network anomalies and infrastructure alerts. Companies that use multiple cloud vendors, like AWS and Azure, have to monitor multiple platforms simultaneously. Teams need a consolidated view of their systems and services in order to respond to alerts faster.  

Managed XDR provides a unified visibility platform by correlating data from endpoint devices like laptops, desktop computers and mobile devices, network data like traffic flows and DNS queries, and telemetry from cloud platforms like AWS, GCP and Azure. It also has visibility into email security systems and identity and access management (IAM) platforms — creating a single point of monitoring. The result is improved efficiency and no more context switching for teams that need to monitor multiple systems at once.

By aggregating data from multiple sources, you enable cross-system correlations that help surface connections between seemingly unrelated events during investigations. In that way, the Managed XDR can identify attacks that, for example, span different cloud providers and treat them as a single campaign instead of dealing with the distinct threat in each platform as separate and unrelated.

Accelerated incident response & remediation

Speed is everything in incident response. It is often the difference between a minor disruption and a catastrophic breach. Manual investigation and response can take hours or days to complete — usually because of environment complexity and the volume of systems that need to be vetted. Managed XDR reduces these times massively by using automated workflows and expert teams.

By joining automated processes with human expertise, you achieve accelerated response. Automated playbooks handle routine threats like quarantining affected endpoints, removing malicious files, severing command-and-control communication, while expert analysts focus on complex scenarios that require investigation and strategic response.

Reduced alert fatigue with AI + human expertise

Large organizations receive thousands of security alerts every day, with many of these being false positives. This creates an unnecessary workload for traditional SOC teams that have to treat every alert as a real potential threat. Each investigation takes time to complete, which stretches resources thin and creates an opportunity for legitimate threats to go unnoticed until it’s too late.

Managed XDR addresses this serious problem by using AI filtering that reduces noise and focuses only on legitimate threats. Machine learning algorithms learn about your organization's baseline activity and establish patterns of behavior. The system distinguishes between legitimate behavior and malicious activity to further cut down on false alarms. It assigns confidence scores to different alerts based on a variety of factors, filtering out duplicates and low-priority events before they reach a human analyst.

Combining expert analysts and advanced detection technology lets Managed XDR cut through the noise, monitoring and evaluating legitimate threats without overwhelming the SOC. Resources are focused on legitimate threats, freeing up time wasted on low-priority events and non-issues.

Cost-efficiency vs. in-house SOC

Making the financial case for Managed XDR is straightforward. Creating your own SOC, even with only basic capabilities, will run into hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars when you consider the required technology and staffing requirements for security professionals.

Savings vary for each organization, but Managed XDR can provide significant operational cost reductions — especially when compared to hiring and maintaining in-house security teams operating on a 24/7 shift roster. With global security professional shortages, retaining top talent in this sector is neither easy nor cheap. 

As demand for these professionals outstrips supply, experienced analysts are often headhunted and recruited to different organizations with large security budgets. This creates an expensive revolving door for companies that have to train and onboard replacement analysts, which takes time and resources.   

Staff shortages cost companies that suffer from reduced visibility while replacements are found and adequately onboarded into the organization. Managed XDR assures you that you will always have expertise on hand to continue your security operations, with reduced staffing complexity and advanced security technologies.

Access to elite security expertise

Skills shortages in cybersecurity are a significant pain point for organizations that need to fill these technical posts. Building a complete team with specialized capabilities like threat hunting and forensic investigation skills is out of reach for most organizations, and that’s before you even factor in the cost of a complete AI and machine learning solution.

Managed XDR provides you with immediate access to teams of seasoned experts without any of the recruitment hurdles. These experts already manage hundreds of client sites and have had exposure to real-world threat patterns and attacker behavior that many in-house security teams have never dealt with before.   

Scalability for growing businesses

Growing your business and expanding your IT infrastructure footprint shouldn’t lead to a compromise in security. If you’re going live with additional locations, spinning up new cloud infrastructure, or experiencing seasonal spikes in activity, you’ll have the coverage you need to keep your systems secure.

Managed XDR is scalable and flexible, making it ideal for environments that are scaling up or rolling back deployments. Your services can be adjusted to match your requirements as they change over time, which gives you more options. 

Organizations lacking security teams 

If your organization doesn’t have dedicated security teams, then Managed XDR makes perfect sense. You get instant access to enterprise-grade security with advanced tooling and decades of combined experience across teams. The cost savings alone versus traditional internal SOC investments make it a compelling option, and if your business has growth plans in the near future, then you have peace of mind knowing that SOC capacity and visibility will not be your limiting factors. You enjoy the benefits that come with having a well-developed team that uses refined techniques with expert tools and advanced AI and ML technologies. 

Organizations looking to augment their SOC 

By leveraging existing resources, companies that use Managed XDR can bolster their security posture and improve their response times and efficiency. Using a hybrid SOC model combines the domain knowledge of existing internal security teams and augments it with external expertise and security applications with integrated intelligence. Using it also gives existing teams more flexibility because the service constantly monitors for urgent threats. This allows management to provide more flexibility for in-house SOC engineers, who no longer need to be on constant shift cycles to maintain visibility over systems. 

Organizations requiring 24/7 coverage 

Any organization that provides 24/7 coverage knows that shift structures usually need to have a minimum of two staff on duty at all times to accommodate breaks and ad hoc investigations. An average SOC team needs enough members to maintain constant visibility during shifts, and staffing numbers can quickly rise to 10 or 12 members (depending on the scope of monitoring and number of systems) just to cover normal shifts that span 24 hours every day. Maintaining teams adds additional pressure within the organization, where management and HR need to find and retain expertise within their set budgets. Managed XDR shields organizations from these complex considerations and makes expert teams available to customers from the start, providing coverage across time zones. 

Organizations with complex multi-cloud/hybrid environments 

Managing multiple platforms is very difficult without fragmenting your alerting and reporting. If you have online assets housed on different platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP), then consolidating your security control tools makes the most sense. Managed XDR offers unified monitoring that does away with swapping between different dashboards and alerting tools — giving you a centralized point of view. 

Organizations in regulated industries 

Companies that operate in sectors like finance, retail and healthcare often have strict compliance requirements that need to be followed like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS. This makes them desirable targets and elevates their risk of cyberattacks. Managed XDR provides real-time monitoring and automated response to help identify and mitigate threats when they occur, and detailed reporting helps organizations meet regulatory guidelines.

Getting enterprise-grade protection doesn’t require a massive budget to maintain. Managed XDR provides a comparatively cost-effective solution that doesn’t have any of the exorbitant costs or management complexity that come with maintaining internal security teams. It also transforms your security team from an overwhelmed and reactive ‘wait and see’ resource and delivers active threat hunting and investigations from security experts with unified tools. 

Barracuda Managed XDR provides advanced threat management and protection to keep your business operations running smoothly, allowing your teams to deal with real alerts when it matters. In 2024, Barracuda Managed XDR processed nearly 11 trillion events with its AI-powered systems from over 40 integrated data sources, and flagged over 1 million risks. As security threats continue to grow in number and frequency, equipping your teams with the resources and detection systems that are needed to combat them is more important than ever.

Schedule a consultation to learn how Barracuda Managed XDR can take your security operations to the next level, or download the XDR e-book to learn more about the technologies and approaches that protect thousands of systems around the world.