XDR and SOAR cybersecurity solutions share capabilities, but they are different. Here, WatchGuard Technologies’ Carlos Arnal explains the key differences and advantages of both solutions for MSPs.

In the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) find themselves at the forefront of the battle to safeguard their clients against advanced security risks.

To effectively protect customers, MSPs must adopt a proactive approach, leveraging cutting-edge solutions to enhance security postures through vigilant detection and swift responses to potential incidents. 

Technologies like SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) or XDR (Extended Detection and Response), help automate, orchestrate and respond to cybersecurity threats.  

While both solutions have similar capabilities in terms of functionality, there are significant differences that must be understood when assessing their value to MSPs.  

SOAR platforms are often an extension of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions, designed to add orchestration, automation and response capabilities to these tools, resulting in a comprehensive threat intelligence platform.  

SOAR provides playbooks detailing the steps to take if an incident occurs, through automating the workflows most used by analysts and helping them implement security middleware that enables communication between different security tools. 

On the other hand, XDR combines, at a minimum, endpoint and network data to improve threat detection, investigation and response, enabling it to provide advanced detection and automated response to mitigate attacks as early as possible while avoiding the added cost of a SOAR solution.  

Adding security tools, such as endpoint security, network security or authentication services – and making sure they communicate and work together to understand and correlate detections – increases visibility. This, in turn, boosts the capabilities of Extended Detection and Response (XDR). 

As a result of this integration, you get a single consolidated security platform that combines threat detection and response, which reduces the time, effort and added complexity of managing multiple independent solutions. 

SOAR solutions focus on the orchestration and automation of cybersecurity incident response processes. The goal of this orchestration is to streamline and improve security team efficiency – by automating manual and repetitive tasks – as well as integrating different tools and processes.  

In contrast, one of XDR’s main strengths is integrating various products from the same vendor, which allows it to detect malicious behaviour and reduce threat detection and response time.  

Integrating different security tools matches security data and puts it into context, producing more confident detections than in those produced in isolated and disconnected solutions.  

This results in fewer alerts, which are also highly actionable, reducing the time it takes a business to respond to and remediate an ongoing attack. 

SOAR’s main objective is to streamline and coordinate response actions through automated workflows.  

XDR focuses on detecting and responding to advanced threats across multiple attack vectors such as endpoints, networks and the Cloud. It aims to provide greater visibility and integrated data correlation for more effective detection.  

Unlike SOAR, it identifies and responds to cybersecurity threats before they become incidents by detecting suspicious patterns and potential risks.  

On a SOAR platform, integration between tools is quite complex, usually involving several tools disconnected from each other. This leads to visibility problems, low priority detections and even false positives.  

For a SOAR tool to be configured and detected correctly, it needs to be regularly tuned, which many companies cannot afford due to the current talent shortage and lack of expertise in the cybersecurity sector.  

XDR addresses this ‘tuning’ issue, by connecting tools or silos through integrating security products, providing much more advanced data analysis for threat detection and response, and providing higher visibility into environments and improved scalability. 

While SOAR focuses on automating incident response workflows, it aims to be more comprehensive, including predefined action execution, task assignment, and incident management.  

XDR, on the other hand, includes a high level of automation, but focuses more on proactive threat detection through advanced analytics and real-time data correlation, offering forensic investigation and incident response capabilities. 

What are the advantages of XDR for an MSP? 

An XDR solution like WatchGuard’s ThreatSync covers many cases addressed by SOAR but in a simpler, more scalable and less costly way.

It improves customers’ security posture by offering MSPs greater visibility and contextual insight into cybersecurity threats, improves advanced threat detection by cross-referencing telemetry from different products, and enables automated or manual response to cyberattacks, all from a single solution.   

In the case of ThreatSync, this capability is included within WatchGuard’s Unified Security Platform and, therefore, has no additional cost to either the partner or its customers. The result is reduced detection and response time to security incidents at a lower cost. 

Find out about more about XDR and how it can help MSPs here: https://www.watchguard.com/wgrd-resource-center/xdr-with-threatsync