Latest / Cybersecurity Business with Fexingo: Security Companies, Breaches, and Enterprise Defense / How Security Teams Use Open XDR to Correlate Alerts
Transcript
- Lucas: Alright, Luna, I want to start with a number that keeps me up at night. The average enterprise security team now receives over eleven thousand alerts per day. Luna: Eleven thousand. And I bet most of them are false positives. Lucas: Exactly. One recent study found that seventy-one percent of those alerts are noise. So you've got analysts drowning in alerts, and the real threats slip through. That's where Open XDR comes in. Luna: Open Extended Detection and Response. We've talked about XDR before, but the 'open' part is the twist. Lucas: Right. Traditional XDR platforms from vendors like Palo Alto Networks or CrowdStrike are great at correlating data from their own tools. But in practice, most enterprises use a mix — maybe CrowdStrike for endpoint, Microsoft for email, Okta for identity. Closed XDR can't stitch those together. Luna: So Open XDR is basically a vendor-agnostic layer that ingests data from any source. Lucas: Exactly. It's built on open standards like STIX and TAXII for threat intelligence sharing, and it uses APIs to pull logs and alerts from dozens of tools. Then it correlates everything into a single incident timeline. I saw a demo from a company called Stellar Cyber where they pulled in forty-seven different data sources in one deployment. Luna: Forty-seven. That's insane. How do they even map the telemetry so it speaks the same language? Lucas: That's the hard part. Most Open XDR platforms use a normalization layer that maps every event to a common schema — often based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework. So whether the alert comes from a firewall saying 'port scan detected' or an EDR saying 'suspicious PowerShell', it all gets tagged with the same MITRE technique ID. Luna: So instead of an analyst jumping between ten dashboards, they get one view. Lucas: One view with automated attack narratives. For example, a fintech company I spoke with — they had a breach six months ago and switched to an Open XDR architecture. Their mean time to detect dropped from twelve hours to under four minutes. And their false positive rate went from seventy percent down to twelve percent. Luna: Twelve hours to four minutes. That's a huge leap. What was their setup before? Lucas: They had a SIEM — a Security Information and Event Management system — from Splunk, plus separate tools for endpoint, network, and email. The SIEM was ingesting everything, but correlation was manual. They had to write custom queries to link alerts. With Open XDR, the correlation engine does that automatically based on rules and machine learning. Luna: So how is Open XDR different from just a modern SIEM? Aren't SIEMs moving in that direction too? Lucas: They are, but the key difference is in how detection and response are integrated. A traditional SIEM is primarily a log storage and search tool. Open XDR includes built-in detection rules, automated response playbooks, and often native threat hunting capabilities. And because it's open, you can swap out your endpoint tool without rebuilding your whole detection pipeline. Luna: That's a big deal for CISOs who are tired of vendor lock-in. If you're locked into a full-stack platform, switching your email security means redoing integrations. Lucas: And that's exactly why the 'open' part matters. One CISO at a healthcare company told me they chose Open XDR specifically because they didn't want to be forced into a single vendor's ecosystem. They use SentinelOne for endpoint, Proofpoint for email, and Zscaler for web — all feeding into the same XDR layer. Luna: But doesn't that create complexity? Maintaining those integrations? Lucas: It does, but most Open XDR vendors offer pre-built connectors for the top fifty or so tools. And they maintain the APIs. So the burden shifts from the IT team to the vendor. The fintech company I mentioned originally had three full-time engineers just managing their SIEM. After moving to Open XDR, they reduced that to one part-time person. Luna: That's a cost savings too, not just a security improvement. Lucas: Absolutely. When you factor in licensing, hardware, and labor, some analysts estimate a forty to sixty percent total cost reduction compared to a traditional SIEM plus separate tools. And you get faster detection. Luna: What's the catch? There's always a catch. Lucas: The main catch is that Open XDR requires your team to be comfortable with APIs and data normalization. If your security operations center is used to clicking through GUIs, the shift to a more data-driven approach can be a learning curve. Also, some closed XDR platforms offer deeper integration with their own products — you can't beat native telemetry from the same vendor. Luna: So it's a trade-off between depth and breadth. Lucas: Exactly. For most enterprises, breadth wins because the threat surface is so wide. A single vendor can't be best in class for email, endpoint, identity, cloud, and network. Open XDR lets you pick best of breed for each layer. Luna: And then there's the emerging role of AI in correlation. I've seen some Open XDR tools using anomaly detection to find patterns that no rule would catch. Lucas: Yes, that's where it gets really interesting. The platform learns what normal looks like for your environment. If an employee suddenly accesses a server they've never touched before at 3 AM, it can create an incident without needing a specific rule. That's where machine learning models trained on MITRE ATT&CK data come in. Luna: So the future of Open XDR is basically a self-tuning detection engine. Lucas: I think so. And the market is moving fast. Gartner projects that by 2027, over fifty percent of organizations will adopt an open detection and response strategy, up from maybe fifteen percent today. Luna: That's a big shift in just a couple of years. Lucas: It is. And if you're building or running a security team, these are exactly the kinds of conversations that help you make better decisions. If these episodes are useful for what you're working on, listener support is what keeps the show ad-free. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to help us keep bringing in guests and digging into the details that matter. Lucas: You can find that at buymeacoffee.com/fexingo. And we really appreciate it. Luna: Alright, back to Open XDR. One more thing I want to touch on — how does this affect MDR services? Managed Detection and Response providers. Lucas: Great point. Many MDR providers are themselves adopting Open XDR architectures so they can manage clients with diverse tool stacks. That means as a customer, you don't have to rip and replace everything to get outsourced detection. You just point your existing tools at their XDR platform. Luna: So Open XDR is really about flexibility and speed — less about the specific tool and more about the data pipeline. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the big idea: security should be about the data, not the dashboard. Luna: I think that's a good note to end on. Lucas: For now, yeah. Next time we'll look at how some teams are using Open XDR to automate incident response across cloud and on-prem environments.