Bitdefender enters native XDR market with new offering

Cybersecurity software maker Bitdefender threw its hat into the extended detection and response (XDR) ring Thursday with a native offering it’s calling GravityZone XDR. The product is designed to get security teams up and running out of the box, with features that include:

• Rapid, cross-correlation threat detection, which uses leading-edge mathematics and threat behavior models to detect advanced threats, initial attack stages, and anomalous application and identity behaviors

• Automated threat identification and prioritization, which uses a built-in incident advisor for root cause and threat context analysis, allowing security teams of any size and skillset to view threat detections, understand a threat’s impact on operations, and take recommended actions to contain or eliminate threats—all from a single view

• Recommended threat response actions that can be resolved across endpoints, identities, email, cloud, and applications, with a single click

Bitdefender also worked on making these features easy to use. “Security technology can seem overwhelming to a security analyst, let alone a layperson, so we built the user interface hand-in-hand with our customers through an early access program,” explains Bitdefender vice president for product and technical marketing Amy Blackshaw. “Customers partnered with us day in, day out, not just on capabilities and problems they were trying to solve, but on how they wanted to consume information from a UI and UX perspective. What that has led to is a very intuitive design.”

XDR built on existing cybersecurity investments

“In the journey to XDR, businesses want to build upon their existing cybersecurity investments,” Michael Suby, a vice president of research at IDC, said in a statement. “They also want XDR to produce tangible results, such as reducing attacker dwell time and improving SOC efficiency. By adding features like pre-built detections into sensors (minimizing custom detection writing), root cause analysis, and alert prioritization, Bitdefender is hitting both objectives.”

Mahmood Haq, CISO at MyVest, a wealth management company, also praised Bitdefender’s product. “GravityZone XDR excels at connecting and correlating incidents over time throughout our entire operations, and we experienced immediate value,” he said in a statement. “The benefit of having a single-vendor solution with out-of-the-box detection capabilities for identifying and investigating known and unknown threats and providing our analysts with the knowledge of what and how an incident happened with the best ways to respond cannot be overstated.”

Native XDR controls what’s coming into the system

A lot of the implementations today are native XDR, which use the vendor’s toolset, observes Forrester Analyst Allie Mellen. “That makes a lot of sense because the challenge of integrating other tools from another third-party ecosystem are the same as those we’ve seen with SIEM,” she says. “Once you start trying to optimize for flexibility and modularity, it becomes difficult to control the quality of protection and to continuously provide detection.”

“Native XDR has taken hold with a lot vendors because it allows them to control what’s coming into the system and what’s going out of the system so they can optimize detection,” Mellen adds.

The alternative to native XDR is open or hybrid XDR. “An open XDR vendor is focusing on the security analytics layer, but doesn’t own the downwind security stack,” Blackshaw explains. “They work through integration of other vendors’ technology, usually through alliances or an ecosystem of security vendors.

A positive aspect of hybrid XDR is it has the potential to mix best-of-breed applications with its offering. “But,” Mellen notes, “clients aren’t as concerned about going for best of breed as they used to be and many of the vendors providing the platform approach already have the best tools on the market.”