Today, cybersecurity company Bitdefender announced the launch of GravityZone XDR, an XDR solution that collects and analyzes data from security telemetry throughout a network environment, correlates events and alerts, and enables security teams to respond to malicious attacks with automated and guided responses. 

In other words, GravityZone XDR aims to provide enterprises with a platform they can use to automatically detect known and unknown threats throughout their environment, while providing human analysts with the intelligence they need to respond to quickly control security incidents. 

For enterprises, XDR solutions like GravityZone XDR offer the potential to empower human security teams to do more with less, automatically detecting threats and providing them with actionable intelligence and automated responses they can use to remediate incidents.  

The need for XDR 

Bitdefender’s XDR launch comes at a time where more security teams are struggling to keep up with the pace that modern cyber threats are developing, with research showing that more than 70% of SOC analysts are experiencing burnout with 60% reporting their workloads have spiked over the past year.  

As cybercriminals attempt increasingly sophisticated threats, organization networks are becoming more complex and difficult to manage. 

“Cyberattacks targeting businesses are becoming much more frequent and advanced often launching in multiple stages. At the same time, businesses are struggling to maintain threat visibility as workloads move to the cloud, new applications are constantly added to operations and attackers become better adept at social engineering to steal credentials,” said Amy Blackshaw, VP of product and technical marketing at Bitdefender. 

Bitdefender’s answer to this predicament is to equip human analysts with greater visibility and automated responses so they can respond at the pace modern attacks move at.

“GravityZone XDR greatly expands threat visibility across infrastructure, workloads and applications by correlating data and threat detections from endpoints, productivity applications, clouds, identity sources and network data into a single view from one console and then give security teams the ability to take immediate actions. This minimizes the dwell time of attackers and reduces the risk of business impact due to a security incident,” Blackshaw said. 

A snapshot of the XDR market 

Bitdefender GravityZone XDR launch comes as the global extended detection and response market is anticipated to grow from a valuation of $2.06 billion in 2020 at a CAGR of 19.9% between 2021 to 2028, as organizations seek to optimize their response capabilities to keep up with the next generation of cyber threats. 

The provider is competing against a number of competitors in the XDR market including SentinelOne, which provides organizations with an autonomous AI endpoint security platform with static and behavioral can identify malicious activity and block/remediate attacks. 

SentinelOne is one of the largest providers in the space with a valuation of over $3 billion, following a $267 million funding round in 2020. 

Another established competitor is CrowdStrike, which last year announced total revenue of $1.45 billion, and offers enterprises a cloud-native endpoint detection and response platform that offers real-time analytics across trillions of events, while predicting and investigating threats in the environment. 

However, Blackshaw argues that GravityZone XDR is well-placed to disrupt the market due to its advanced threat detection capabilities that make it stand out from competitors. 

“Unlike some competitors, we are providing highly advanced threat detection, correlation and remediation capabilities that is both impactful and affordable for businesses of any size,” Blackshaw said. “In addition, we are providing core security hardening and prevention capabilities as part of our XDR offering — so we cover the critical security layer of threat prevention along with detection and response.”