Improving SOC Efficiency with XDR: A Comprehensive Guide

March 25, 2025
Srestha Roy

Legacy SOCs are failing to keep pace with the speed of today’s threats and evolving attack complexity. The issues of alert fatigue, segmented visibility, and slow response rates are making businesses vulnerable and running up operating expenditures. XDR is beginning to emerge as an innovative answer to these challenges—and one that aligns threat detection, investigation, and response functions across disparate layers of security. By delivering comprehensive visibility, intelligent automation, and faster response, XDR empowers security teams to stay ahead of advanced threats. In this blog, we’ll explore how XDR addresses the key limitations of traditional SOCs and transforms their performance with next-generation capabilities.

The Limitations of Traditional SOCs and Why They Need XDR

SOCs, or Security Operation Centers, are the bone and stalk of an organization while carrying out a cyber-attack. But then, as threats grow into sophisticated recursions, the SOCs have begun losing their effectiveness against them; the central snag is the legacy systems still fragmented into segregated tools like SIEM (Security Information and Event Management), EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response), and so forth.

Common Pain Points of Traditional SOCs

Alert Fatigue

Legacy SOCs produce enormous volumes of alerts every day, most of which are false positives. This alert flood leads to alert fatigue, where security analysts cannot distinguish between significant threats and noise. Thus, important alerts can be ignored or get slow responses.
Fragmented Visibility

With data spread out on endpoints, networks, clouds, and applications, traditional SOCs tend to lack visibility. Security teams are left to manually correlate data across sources, struggling to obtain an enterprise-wide perspective on potential threats.
Ineffective Threat Detection and Response

Legacy systems are not automated enough or endowed with the sophisticated analytics necessary to detect complex threats rapidly. Merging by hand, prioritizing alerts, and pursuing investigations takes not only a lot of time but also poses a higher chance of missing key IoCs.
Resource-Hungry Processes

Traditional SOC operation is resource-hungry, needing intense human intervention and specialized skill. This use of manual processes renders scaling cybersecurity operations difficult.

How XDR Solves These Pain Points

1: Unified Visibility

XDR provides end-to-end visibility through correlation and unification of data across multiple security layers, including:

Endpoints, Networks, Servers, and Cloud Workloads: Integrating data from different sources allows security teams to get one complete view of their environment, instead of being presented with siloed alerts from individual tools.
Contextualized Threat Analysis: Instead of triggering naked alerts, XDR delivers enriched information, providing more in-depth insights into possible threats by highlighting the correlation between unrelated incidents.
Improved Decision-Making: The analysts are informed better with end-to-end visibility into their network and are capable of detecting anomalies, exposing blind spots, and responding more precisely.

Breaking security silos through single pane of glass allows businesses to enhance situational awareness and detection and response in general.

2. Enhanced Threat Detection

XDR greatly improves threat detection accuracy with next-generation process and technology, including:

Full Data Analysis: In contrast to event analysis of individual legacy products, XDR examines data from multiple sources in an effort to identify advanced threats evaded by legacy systems.
Behavioral Analysis & Machine Learning: Through ongoing learning from historical data, XDR identifies malicious variation from normal behavioral patterns, catching threat evading the sieve of legacy signature-based defenses.
Multi-Vector Attack Detection: Viewing evasive, coordinated attacks at endpoints, networks, and cloud with a very robust defense perimeter for impending attacks.
Proactive Threat Hunting: Active threat hunting of attack tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and indicators of compromise (IoCs) can be actively performed by analysts to pre-predict threats.

The future-ready threat detection capability of XDR enhances high-risk incident detection precision to allow security teams to respond prior to significant breaches occurring.

3. Streamlined Response Processes

XDR enhances response efficiency by automating and streamlining important processes like:

Automated Incident Containment: Isolating affected systems automatically and triggering remediation actions upon threat detection, minimizing damage and reducing time to containment.
Smart Alert Prioritization: Alert prioritization on severity, relevance, and predicted impact so the analyst can respond to high-priority incidents while not being bothered with false positives.
Playbooks in Integrated Form: Automated playbooks for responses that walk through remediation for analysts, cutting risk of mishap and ensuring rapid, expected response.
Superior Investigation Functionality: Delighting end-to-end timelines, visualizations, and historical backfill to enable providing comprehensive investigation and cause analysis.

By consolidating response process, XDR provides massive time and effort savings in containing and remediating the attack, making overall efficiency scalable.

4. Scale and Efficiency

XDR offers a scalable, resource-light solution that is specifically designed to meet the requirements of today’s SOCs:

Unified Architecture: Rolls much of the detection and response tools into one platform, simpler to manage, and less complicated to manage disparate systems.
Automated Workflows: Reduces manual effort by automating routine processes such as threat triage, investigation, and remediation so that analysts can concentrate on more important tasks.
Elastic Scaling: As the infrastructure grows within an organization, so does XDR, which can process more data without decreasing detection and response efficiency.
Continuous Improvement & Learning: Enhances response and detection capability with the passage of time as it learns from past events and refines the response mechanisms accordingly.
Increased Utilization of Resources: Efficient processes and automated processes enable organizations to scale operations without necessarily requiring more staff.

Increased scalability and effectiveness through XDR enable organizations to still maintain robust security even as their infrastructure continues to expand.

How XDR Enhances Threat Detection and Response Effectiveness in SOCs

Legacy SOCs would possess slow and reactive threat detection and response. XDR (Extended Detection and Response) revolutionizes the process with enhanced capabilities to enable SOCs to detect, investigate, and respond to threats better and faster.

1. Enhanced Threat Detection through Unified Visibility

One of the major reasons why legacy SOCs fall short is that they do not have a single pane of glass view of various layers of security. XDR addresses this by correlating and aggregating email system telemetry, cloud workload telemetry, server telemetry, network telemetry, and endpoint telemetry on a single platform.

Centralized Data Correlation: Instead of doing piecemeal data reconstruction from various sources, XDR provides end-to-end visibility. Through this combined approach, analysts get the ability to identify threats that would be missed under separate monitoring.
Deeper Threat Context: XDR provides contextualized threat intelligence, making it simpler to identify the source, impact, and reach of a particular attack. Correlating across domains, analysts get more insights into malicious threats.

2. Proactive Threat Hunting

XDR allows security teams to proactively hunt for latent threats before they inflict any harm. Through ongoing monitoring of networks, endpoints, and applications, it picks up on suspicious activity and probable threats that conventional methods might not detect.

3. Automated Incident Response for Increased Efficiency

Manual response and triage are typical pitfalls of conventional SOCs, which are interpreted as slow reaction times. XDR has the ability to automate most of the process, reducing the workflow from detection to remediation.

Example : If a malware file is discovered on an endpoint and, minutes later, strange traffic appears on the network, a traditional EDR solution may report the file independently. However, XDR recognizes the relationship between the network traffic and the file, providing clear indicators of lateral movement. Automated playbooks enable XDR to swiftly isolate the threat within minutes, preventing further damage.

By increasing detection rates, lowering false positives, and automating response processes, XDR greatly enhances the effectiveness of SOCs. The result is an optimized security operation that can actively combat emerging threats.

Cut Through the Noise with Fidelis XDR

This datasheet reveals how Fidelis Elevate^® enhances threat detection and response through:

Simplifying SOC Operations with XDR: Why Choose Fidelis Elevate?

XDR simplifies SOC operations and improves detection and response. Merging all security tools and processes onto a single platform helps to remove significant operation issues that SOCs encounter.

1. Single Incident Handling to be More Effective

It is natural that managing multiple dashboards to monitor various security tools generally results in inefficiency and response delay.

Single Dashboard: There is one dashboard that displays all the critical security information, offering end-to-end visibility to analysts in their infrastructure without having to constantly switch tools. For example, if an organization's SOC must investigate a possible incident, having it all in one place means nothing vital falls through the cracks.
Rapid Resolution: Systematic reporting of incidents enables smooth and effective investigations to provide faster and improved results. A well-organized dashboard enables analysts to make rapid incident connection decisions and take appropriate action accordingly.

Fidelis Elevate plays a central role in automating incident management and process optimization, enabling organizations to respond to threats in a timely and accurate manner. By streamlining security operations, Fidelis Elevate enhances the effectiveness of these processes, ensuring a more efficient and robust defense against potential risks.

Eliminating False Positives and Enhancing Alert Prioritization

SOC analysts spend precious time on pursuing false alarms, i.e., wasted resources and response lag.

Fidelis Elevate enhances the accuracy and prioritization of alerts, boosting the potency of threat detection. By optimizing alert processing, Fidelis Elevate ensures that serious threats are identified quickly, significantly reducing the risk of potential damage.

3. Improving Collaboration Among Security Teams

Network, endpoint, and cloud security team coordination breakdowns can be enormous in terms of response time.

Seamless Workflows: Threats are escalated to the appropriate teams automatically, ensuring response action is effective and seamless. Upon detection of malware, for example, the system automatically notifies the network and endpoint teams so that there is coordinated response.
Enhanced Communication: Seam communication skills enable teams to communicate freely with each other, exchanging observations, findings, and remediation actions. This efficient process eliminates communication lag and enhances overall productivity.

Fidelis Elevate enhances collaboration processes by silo-breaking and response optimization. It promotes synchronized efforts between teams, resulting in quicker and more accurate threat handling.

4. Operational Scalability with Automation

Scaling up operations without burdening the analysts would prove to be a challenge, particularly for large organizations that handle vast amounts of data.

Automated Playbooks: Automated remediation playbooks, threat hunting playbooks, and incident triage playbooks maximize the effectiveness of SOC. For example, when a phishing attack is identified, the system can quarantine the infected system automatically and trigger remediation processes.
Continuous Learning: Over time, detection and response capabilities become better with learning from past events so that they can scale better and remain more resilient. Continuous improvement as a process makes the platform better with each incident it processes.

Fidelis Elevate also enables the processing of more data without compromising security performance. By automating tasks, it allows companies to strengthen their defenses and effectively combat emerging threats.

See How Fidelis Elevate® XDR Stays Ahead of Threats Includes:

Best Practices for Implementing XDR in Your SOC

A successful XDR deployment plan can greatly improve SOC effectiveness.To ensure easy transition and utilization of XDR benefits to the fullest, organizations should adhere to the following best practices:

1. Define Security Requirements and Objectives Clearly

Prior to deploying XDR, it is important to define your organization’s particular security objectives. Determine the key assets, attack surfaces, and regulatory needs that the solution must respond to.

Example: A bank might focus on phishing attack detection and lateral movement prevention within its networks.

Pro Tip: Perform an extensive risk assessment to determine where XDR will have the greatest effect.

2. Select the Appropriate XDR Solution

Not all XDR solutions are equal. Worth choosing a solution that fits with your organization’s security architecture and operational needs.
What to consider:

Support for integrating with existing tools such as SIEM, EDR, and network security appliances.

Support for scaling and the amount of telemetry data being generated.

Automation capabilities that enable threat detection, investigation, and response.

Example: If your SOC depends mostly on cloud infrastructure, choose an XDR solution with excellent cloud workload protection capabilities.

3. Encourage Inter-Team Collaboration

XDR’s built-in model is most powerful when all security teams—network, endpoint, cloud, and application security—are collaborative.

Adopt Integrated Workflows: Define clearly delineated procedures for the sharing of alerts, findings, and remediation plans across different teams.

Promote Communication: Periodically review incident reports to ensure teams are on the same page when it comes to threat response procedures.

4. Use Automation and AI to Become More Efficient

One of the finest aspects of XDR is the way in which it can automate mundane work. Organizations must ensure that they implement automated playbooks to counter frequent threats.

Few examples of application areas:

Automatically isolating infected endpoints.

Creating detailed incident reports.

Executing pre-defined remediation steps for specific types of attacks.

Continuous Improvement:

It regularly updates automated playbooks based on insights from past incidents.

5. Continuously Monitor and Optimize Your XDR Implementation

Even after successful deployment, monitor the performance of your XDR solution closely and make necessary adjustments.

Metrics to Monitor:

Detection accuracy.
Response times.
False positive rates.

Feedback Loop: Regularly review logs, alerts, and incident reports to fine-tune detection models and optimize operational efficiency.

Conclusion

With ever more sophisticated and evolved cyberattacks, organizations have to continue to boost their Security Operations Centers (SOCs) so that they remain a step ahead. Fidelis Elevate is designed to redesign threat detection, investigation, and response across all layers of security.

With reduced false positives, improved incident management, and motivating security teams to collaborate, Fidelis Elevate enables organizations to improve their standing in cybersecurity and combat threats with velocity and accuracy.

To achieve maximum XDR, accurate planning, solution selection, and constant optimization are necessary. Fidelis Elevate provides a consolidated, holistic solution that provides accelerated threat detection, easy response, and increased operational effectiveness—securing your organization robust against constantly changing cyber threats.

Ready to turn your SOC into a proactive security team? Learn how Fidelis XDR can protect your business—schedule a demo today!

Frequently Ask Questions

What is XDR, and how does it benefit SOC operations?

XDR (Extended Detection and Response) is an integrated cybersecurity solution that unifies data from multiple security layers like endpoints, networks, and cloud environments. It benefits SOC operations by improving visibility, enhancing threat detection accuracy, reducing false positives, and streamlining response workflows.

How does XDR differ from traditional EDR and SIEM solutions?

While EDR focuses on endpoint protection and SIEM aggregates logs from various sources, XDR goes a step further by correlating data across multiple domains, providing comprehensive threat detection and response capabilities from a single platform.

What are the key best practices for implementing XDR in a SOC?

The best practices include clearly defining security objectives, choosing the right XDR solution, fostering collaboration between security teams, leveraging automation, and continuously monitoring and optimizing the XDR deployment for improved efficiency.

About Author

Srestha Roy

Srestha is a cybersecurity expert and passionate writer with a keen eye for detail and a knack for simplifying intricate concepts. She crafts engaging content and her ability to bridge the gap between technical expertise and accessible language makes her a valuable asset in the cybersecurity community. Srestha's dedication to staying informed about the latest trends and innovations ensures that her writing is always current and relevant.

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