Cybersecurity analytics and operations is more difficult today than it was 2 years ago, according to a recent survey of security professionals conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

The research finds some of the top reasons why security teams struggle more now include:

As the attack surface and threat landscape grow more complex, security teams say alerts in the security operations center (SOC), generated from many disparate security controls, have also become complicated and difficult to monitor.

Survey respondents listed their top three challenges with alerts as:

Many organizations are exploring extended detection and response (XDR) to help detect complex attacks. XDR is an integrated suite of security products spanning hybrid IT architectures designed to coordinate on threat prevention, detection, and response. The tech is meant to unify control points, security telemetry, analytics, and operations into one enterprise system.

ESG reports those who are interested in XDR find the following capabilities most appealing:

Dave Gruber, senior analyst with ESG, examines the XDR market and the technology's potential in SOCs in a recent Dark Reading webinar Making XDR Work in Your Enterprise.

The webinar's discussion centers on how XDR applies to real-life environments and scenarios, and how it works with, and independently from, other tools. It also touches on common challenges with deployment of XDR solutions.

The webinar can be accessed here.