Microland Open and Composable XDR Architecture - Why Should Businesses Care?

Business leaders are taking every effort to create highly secure enterprise environments. With accelerated digital adoption across enterprises, digital environments have become connected more than ever before. To survive in an increasingly competitive digital industry and a dynamic threat landscape, enterprises need to protect themselves from cyber threats through an integrated defense mechanism. That’s where an XDR architecture plays an important role and going by the trends, it is well-poised to become the architecture of choice for ensuring cyber defense.

Why is XDR important?

The attack surface of modern applications has grown to be as large as traditional operating systems. This means that we must rely on novel techniques for maintaining a constant level of security for the applications in use. Rather than just attempting to secure every layer in a monolithic architecture, components should be compartmentalized into smaller subsystems and secured by modern in-depth-defense measures. These layers can then be composed in more complex arrangements to build secure and scalable applications. By building modern cyber tools such as EDR, NDR, NextGen security Data Lake and IAM, one can greatly increase resiliency against cyber-attacks while improving the ability to achieve complete composability in application architectures.

How does it work?

The vast majority of cybersecurity products use a monolithic approach, which means, they are all closed-source black boxes. While these solutions may be effective for certain type of cybersecurity threats, their closed nature can expose organizations to other type of attacks because even with advanced threat protection, there’s little to no visibility into what data goes in or out of systems. In contrast, enterprises interested in in-depth defense capabilities should turn to an open approach to security architecture, which is also known as an open XDR architecture. The most important aspect of XDR architecture is its composability – the ability for different layers (read technology components) to work together and play off each other’s strengths.

Microland XDR stack architecture and its benefits

The key principle of Microland’s XDR Architecture is to create an open, composable, secure and extensible platform that addresses the challenges of advanced attack surface threats. Open architecture benefits from open standards, plug-and-play, interoperability API and extensibility, and intelligence signal sharing. They all allow others to easily see how it works and create extensions to it with less effort.  

This brings us to the concept of compositionality. Composable architectures are designed in such a way that they can be decomposed into their components or subsystems. This means customer can leverage existing investments to assemble these small systems into very large systems by adding or removing modules as needed. Composable XDR architectures do not generally require every piece of a solution to be upgraded at once. They simply allow solutions to grow over time through incremental additions or replacements of individual modules as required by the business.

Next Steps?

Focus on mechanisms that work best for your specific use-cases, users, or applications with an adaptable architecture to manage the evolving security threats. Regardless of which cyber tools you end up adopting, it’s important to have a plan in place so that enterprise applications always remain secure.