Health

The Advantages of a Broad & Open Integration Ecosystem — Cisco

March 30, 2025

An open integration method for prolonged detection and response (XDR) empowers organizations to harness the complete potential of their safety ecosystems. This open method supplies safety analysts with the agility to leverage the most effective instruments and entry the most effective info to guard their explicit environments. This not solely will increase crew effectivity but additionally the pace at which they’ll react to potential threats and reduces dwell time. Cisco XDR stands out on this area by providing unmatched integration capabilities with not solely Cisco options however a broad array of third-party instruments. This isn’t a one-and-done endeavor — it requires fixed planning and execution from dedicated product administration and growth groups, including new and enhancing present integrations.

Thus far, we now have seen sturdy demand for this method and greater than 900 organizations worldwide now leverage Cisco XDR to guard the integrity of their IT infrastructure. A part of the explanation for this broad enchantment is that we meet safety practitioners the place they’re, permitting them to get most worth from the individuals and the instruments that they have already got. That functionality is, after all, predicated on our capability to work with these instruments, no matter vendor.

Within the final six months, Cisco XDR has added or considerably enhanced 21 integrations with merchandise from Cisco and ten completely different third-party technical companions, sharing telemetry and safety detections whereas rising interoperability to ship highly effective outcomes in minutes as a substitute of days.

The brand new integrations align primarily with 5 product areas – Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), E-mail Risk Protection, Community Detection and Response (NDR), Subsequent-Era Firewall (NGFW), and Safety Data and Occasion Administration (SIEM) – which are crucial for Safety Operations Heart (SOC) operators. Additionally they embrace different key safety and collaboration instruments to deepen the understanding of safety operators and incident responders whereas rising crew effectivity and decreasing dwell time. The capabilities these integrations ship to Cisco XDR embrace:

Incident Detection — If the software captures system or community telemetry, or detects security-relevant actions or occasions, Cisco XDR can ingest that info into the pool of knowledge for evaluation, or put these detections into the client’s mixed incident queue, so the menace could be neutralized utilizing the complete breadth of Cisco XDR’s incident response instruments.
Safety Controls and Response — If the software manages entry to methods, networks, information, or different organizational property, Cisco XDR permits responders and operators want to have the ability to leverage these capabilities to guard these property from identified and unknown threats, each reactively and proactively (e.g. clicking a button in Cisco XDR that blocks an IP by setting a brand new rule on a firewall).
Risk Investigation — If the software has details about menace artifacts, whether or not it’s gleaned from throughout the buyer surroundings (e.g. DNS logs displaying communication with a identified C&C) or from menace intelligence instruments like a malware sandbox or botnet tracker (e.g. discovering out the main points of the malware that probably initiated the connection), Cisco XDR can ingest that info. This may be crucial to a corporation’s have to be knowledgeable about present and potential future threats in significant ways in which drive optimum defenses.
Collaboration — If the crew is already utilizing any of the highest chat or collaboration instruments, Cisco XDR can be a part of and even create channels to submit details about new or up to date incidents and might even take instructions and current the outcomes by way of these channels.
Automation — All of the above safety outcomes, and extra, could be leveraged by Cisco XDR in each automated and semi-automated methods to drive quicker response occasions to quite a lot of threats and situations.

All these crucial capabilities are carried out by each SOC. Cisco XDR helps these groups make higher use of the instruments that drive these capabilities by offering a typical framework from which to leverage every product’s particular contributions. The extra instruments our prospects can leverage in that context, the smoother and quicker their efficiency can be.

Open > Native

For that purpose, since inception, Cisco XDR has adopted an Open XDR philosophy, or to be extra exact, Hybrid XDR. With Cisco’s broad portfolio of top-tier safety instruments, we may have gone the Native XDR route and require prospects to purchase the Cisco stack to get any cheap quantity of XDR outcomes. Nonetheless, that may not be in the most effective pursuits of shoppers who pursue a best-of-breed method, worth vendor variety, or are within the means of migrating to Cisco safety suites however need to get the advantages of XDR proper now.

Cisco XDR has open and documented protocols primarily based on business requirements. We now have open and documented RESTful APIs with API prototyping instruments constructed into the product. It’s our purpose to not solely provide a wide selection of out-of-the-box integrations, however to permit our companions and prospects to simply add their very own integrations, making their merchandise and even bespoke in-house instruments XDR-capable.

Speed up Velocity with Excessive Confidence

For that purpose, final 12 months we launched a program for Cisco Verified integrations. These integrations are written by trusted Cisco companions to convey their merchandise into the Cisco XDR ecosystem and are vetted by Cisco XDR Engineering and High quality Assurance groups previous to launch. You may see the authorship particulars of all integrations on the Administration/Integrations web page.

Primarily based partially on the effectivity pushed by these capabilities, the most recent checklist of latest or upgraded Cisco XDR integrations contains some integrations that have been written by Cisco, and a few by our companions. The deliveries within the first half of the Cisco fiscal 12 months (August 2024 to January 2025) embrace:

Software, Identification and System Administration: Cisco Safe Entry, Jamf Professional, Microsoft Intune
Cloud Detection and Response: Cisco Safe DDoS Safety, Cisco Safe WAF
EDR: SentinelOne Singularity
E-mail Safety: Microsoft Defender for Office365
Enterprise Backup: Rubrik
IT Service Administration (ITSM): ServiceNow
NDR: Cisco Safe Community Analytics, NETSCOUT Omnis Cyber Intelligence (OCI)
NGFW: Cisco Meraki MX, Palo Alto Networks
SIEM: Cisco Splunk Cloud
Vulnerability Administration: Cisco Vulnerability Administration (CVM) — previously Kenna
Different: Endace, our first integration with a packet seize product