The 2024 Global Digital Trust Insights survey from PwC reports that 36% of businesses have experienced a data breach that cost more than $1 million to remediate. Cyber threats are clearly on the rise and in today’s volatile threat environment, it is a matter of when - not if - a cybersecurity incident will occur. Digital adversaries are becoming more sophisticated and relying on weak links to exploit company applications and infrastructure.

This blog explores each acronym for those hearing them for the first time and for professionals who’d like to brush up on them.

Cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated, and enterprise security teams are under constant pressure to improve and enhance their threat detection and response capabilities. But as security teams expand their security logging tools and capabilities, the burden of monitoring those tools and investigating alerts grows exponentially.

One of the biggest buzzwords (or really, buzz acronyms) to pop up in the cybersecurity space in recent years is XDR, or, extended detection and response. The term was coined in 2018 by Nir Zuk, CTO and co-founder of Palo Alto Networks. It was posited as a new way to think about security, where data is taken from several platforms and it gets correlated and analyzed.

Elastic Security's newest features define the potential of XDR for cybersecurity teams. Our single platform brings together SIEM and endpoint security, allowing users to ingest and retain large volumes of data from diverse sources, store and search data for longer, and augment threat hunting with detections and machine learning. Security vendors are using the term “XDR” with increasing frequency, applying varied definitions to suit their respective technologies.

We are pleased to announce the general availability (GA) of Elastic 7.14, including our Elastic Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security solutions, which are built into the Elastic Stack — Elasticsearch and Kibana. Elastic 7.14 empowers organizations with the first free and open Limitless XDR, which delivers unified SIEM and endpoint security capabilities in one platform.

Extended Detection and Response (XDR) has generated a lot of buzz recently with press, analysts, and even customers. There’s no denying that, at face value, its promise of reduced complexity and cost while increasing detection and response is alluring. As security teams look to modernize their security tooling, they’re also looking for solutions to some of their largest challenges. Is XDR the answer? What is XDR, exactly, and how do you determine if it’s right for your organization?