Building a Virtual SOC with the Cortex Suite of Products

How XDR, XSOAR, and Xpanse Deliver World-Class Outcomes Without Deploying a Traditional SOC

What if you knew deploying only three security products could greatly improve protection, defense and response against aggressive modern cyberattacks? Well, the reality is that Cortex XDR, Cortex XSOAR and Cortex Xpanse are doing precisely that for customers who desire SOC outcomes without having a traditional SOC architecture in place.

These solutions, especially when used together, could improve your TCO, save time by automating tasks, and increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your team in ways that legacy solutions simply weren’t designed to do. And, what’s best, is that you don’t have to have a traditional Security Operations Center (SOC) in place to experience these benefits.

These three products form a holistic ecosystem with a view of the security posture for targeted threat detection, behavioral monitoring, intelligence, asset discovery and risk assessment – a virtual SOC that can be managed without dependencies on a physical location or assets.

Get continuous protection with uninterrupted monitoring for threat detection and
prevention, while holistically organizing and managing security
operations for a healthy security posture

We realize security teams come in all sizes, yet are still burdened by the same security challenges as their larger peers, including alert fatigue (too many low fidelity alerts), time-consuming investigations and repetitive manual tasks. Throw in folks wearing multiple hats – from first responders to auditing and compliance support – and you have a recipe for not only burning staff out, but worse, having a network breached because a suspicious event broke through defenses. Ouch, that always hurts.

We think there is a better approach to prevent and avoid those scenarios – one that provides full visibility, integrates and analyzes data across sources to prevent zero-day attacks, and uses automation to decrease response time and reduce human effort for security analysts. Critical times call for critical capabilities, and Cortex delivers.

Cortex Has You Covered

You can begin or accelerate your SOC journey by deploying the Cortex suite of products, which seamlessly work together as a force multiplier across your security operations. Immediate high-level advantages from all three products are as follows:

Cortex Xpanse for Robust Attack Surface Management: A complete and accurate inventory of an organization’s global, internet-facing assets and misconfigurations to continuously discover, evaluate and mitigate an external attack surface, and evaluate supplier risk or assess the security of M&A targets.

Cortex XSOAR for Progressive Security Automation and Response: Cortex XSOAR provides end-to-end incident and security operational process lifecycle management. It helps companies accelerate security operations, reduce the time it takes to investigate and respond to security alerts and incidents, and to handle more incidents. Security teams of all sizes can orchestrate, automate, speed incident response and any security workflow or security process across their environment by leveraging the extensive vendor integration and 725+ pre-built integration content packs to maximize enterprise integration coverage.

Cortex XDR for Ironclad Endpoint Security: Cortex XDR can stop attacks at the endpoint and host with world-class EDR for Windows and Linux hosts:

• AI-driven local analysis and ML-based behavioral analysis that are updated regularly.
• A suite of endpoint protection features, such as device control, host firewall and disk encryption.
• A range of protection modules to protect against pre-execution and post-execution exploits.

Once you prevent everything you can at the endpoint, Cortex XDR goes even farther. It provides detection and response that focuses on incidents by automating evidence, gathering groups of alerts associated, putting those alerts into a timeline, and revealing the root cause to speed triage and investigations for analysts of all skill levels.

Great on Their Own, Yet Better Together

With end-to-end native integration and interoperability, security teams can close the loop on threats with continual synergies across the Cortex ecosystem. All three products work in concert to monitor the threat landscape and provide the most robust prevention, detection, response and investigation capabilities:

• Cortex XDR provides endpoint security and EDR to block sophisticated attacks using AI-driven analysis and a range of protection modules.
• Cortex XDR and Cortex Xpanse provide the ultimate visibility and detections across the internet attack surface, endpoints, cloud and network.
• Cortex XDR and Cortex Xpanse leverage Cortex XSOAR for full orchestration, automation and response capabilities.
• Cortex XSOAR leverages Cortex XDR and Cortex Xpanse to provide high-fidelity detections and alerts to drive orchestrated workflows.
• Cortex Xpanse discovers unknown assets and risks, allowing Cortex XSOAR to automate remediation efforts.

Our hope is that we can democratize security, regardless of team size, providing the solutions teams need today to protect against tomorrow's threats.

Get started on your SOC transformation journey by downloading our white paper, Building a Virtual SOC with Cortex today.