Cisco XDR

Cisco revealed at RSAC 2023 that it’s launching a new extended detection and response (XDR) platform that’s been built from the “ground up” and goes beyond the prior XDR capabilities that have been available in the tech giant’s SecureX offering, according to Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration at Cisco. The new Cisco XDR platform fuses network detection and response (NDR) and endpoint detection and response (EDR), providing “cross-domain telemetry” in a way that no one else in the market is doing, Patel said. The offering also stands out from security information and event management (SIEM) products by being “near real-time” when it comes to delivering threat detection and prioritization, he said.

In addition, Cisco XDR is differentiated by providing “high-fidelity data” from across the company’s various first-party security tools, such as Cisco Secure Client (formerly AnyConnect) for endpoint, he said. The XDR platform integrates a significant number of major third-party security products as well. Those include EDR tools (Microsoft Defender, Cybereason, Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR, SentinelOne Singularity and Trend Micro Vision One); email security (Microsoft Defender for Office, Proofpoint); next-generation firewall from Palo Alto Networks; SIEM from Microsoft Sentinel; and NDR from ExtraHop Reveal(x).

“This one is one of the biggest security product launches we’ve had in a while,” Patel said, and represents a major step on Cisco’s journey to fulfill its Security Cloud vision of providing a comprehensive, unified platform for modern security.