More and more businesses have moved their operations to the cloud. Doing so gives them greater flexibility and more opportunities to scale, but it also opens the doors to a host of sophisticated cyber threats due to the new technologies that are being adopted along with the cloud. The need to combat these threats has led to a set of security capabilities called cloud detection and response (CDR).

In this post, we'll look more closely at the roles of CDR and endpoint detection and response (EDR) in cybersecurity. We’ll consider their differences and similarities. Then, we’ll look at how integrating them can strengthen your organization's overall defense.

Understanding CDR

CDR focuses on the unique challenges of cloud security, such as adversary sophistication, the skills gap, and disparate security solutions slowing down response times. It engages every stage of the incident life cycle — from early detection to remediation — providing comprehensive security that yields swift cloud threat detection and response.

The key functions of CDR include:

• Around-the-clock cloud monitoring and threat hunting: Tools continuously monitor cloud activities and respond to threats, including those that move laterally from the cloud to endpoint devices. By employing managed detection and response (MDR) services, organizations can ensure their cloud environments are under the nonstop protection of automated tools and a dedicated 24/7 team of security experts.
• Threat intelligence: CDR uses detailed threat intelligence to provide insights into potential attack paths and streamline incident response. With threat intelligence that covers lateral movement across clouds, identities, and endpoints, CDR enables your security team to craft more targeted defensive strategies and deliver faster and more effective responses to potential breaches.
• Integration within a CNAPP: As part of a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP), CDR contributes to an overall cloud security strategy, enhancing your ability to prevent, detect, and respond to threats quickly and effectively.

Naturally, organizations that employ CDR enjoy a host of benefits. CDR helps your organization do the following:

• Reduce cloud risks: Offers proactive identification and mitigation of vulnerabilities, reducing the overall risk to your cloud environments.
• Prevent cloud breaches: Stops unauthorized access and prevents potential data exfiltration, safeguarding the sensitive information you store in the cloud.
• Enhance visibility: Unifies your visibility, making it easier to monitor and control security aspects across the entire spectrum of cloud services.
• Speed up threat detection and mitigation: Narrows the window of time between threat detection and response, reducing the potential damage of an incident.
• Minimize incident impact: Offers swift incident detection and response, reducing the blast radius of a security breach.
• Scale security measures: Offers adaptive security measures, providing consistent protection regardless of the scale of resources or the complexity of the cloud architecture.

Understanding EDR

EDR similarly focuses on threat detection and response, but it addresses a different attack surface. EDR secures endpoint devices such as computers, mobile devices, and servers. Key functions include:

• Continuous endpoint monitoring and event recording: EDR tools provide continuous monitoring of endpoint activities, logging every action and event. This helps detect any deviation from normal behavior that might indicate a security threat.
• Data search, investigation, and threat hunting: By providing access to historical data, EDR enables your security team to perform deeper analysis and search for indicators of compromise. This is crucial for investigating breaches after they occur and for proactively hunting for hidden threats.
• Suspicious activity detection: EDR systems analyze behavior patterns to identify anomalous activities — such as unusual data access or unauthorized application execution — that may suggest a security breach.
• Alert triage or suspicious activity validation: EDR tools prioritize alerts based on threat severity, helping your security team focus on the most critical issues first. They also validate suspicious activities to distinguish false positives from genuine threats.
• Data analysis: EDR tools analyze collected data to provide you with insights into the nature of a threat and its potential impact, guiding your security team’s response strategy.
• Threat intelligence enrichment: EDR systems integrate with threat intelligence tools to enhance the context of detected incidents, allowing for more informed decision-making.
• Automated enterprise-scale remediation for rapid response: EDR solutions can also be set up to employ automated responses — such as device isolation or process termination — to quickly contain a threat.

Organizations that implement EDR experience the following benefits:

• Enhanced detection of advanced threats: Identifies complex threats that traditional security measures might miss, providing a higher level of security.
• Continuous monitoring and real-time analysis: Allows for immediate detection and response to threats, which is crucial for minimizing impact and damage.
• Detailed forensic capabilities: Helps organizations trace the origin of attacks and understand attack vectors while providing detailed incident reports that are essential for recovery and compliance.
• Automated response mechanisms: Reduces the time and effort required to manage incidents, with automation enabling faster remediation and reducing the impact on business operations.
• Streamlined compliance and risk management: Provides detailed logging and reporting capabilities that can help your organization comply with regulations and manage risks more effectively.

Comparing CDR and EDR

CDR and EDR share the common aim of detecting and responding to breaches, but they operate in distinct environments. Understanding how they compare can help your organization ensure that it deploys the right tools for the right tasks.

Key differences

CDR and EDR defend different parts of an organization's digital infrastructure, and this leads to some important distinctions:

• Operational focus: CDR is crafted specifically for cloud environments and addresses security challenges unique to cloud computing, including multi-tenant architectures. In contrast, EDR focuses on endpoint devices. It protects against malware, ransomware, and other threats that directly affect individual devices.
• Integration and scalability: CDR integrates well with cloud architectures, and it can enhance your organization’s existing cloud security measures. It also scales well alongside your cloud deployments. On the other hand, EDR’s focus on endpoints — which may be scattered across various networks — enables comprehensive visibility into a range of endpoint types and operating systems.

Key similarities

Despite their differences, CDR and EDR share several commonalities:

• Stopping the breach: Both technologies aim to prevent breaches, whether they occur in cloud platforms or on individual devices. By employing CDR and EDR, your organization can further enact a defense-in-depth strategy that secures your systems against attacks.
• Proactive threat hunting: Both proactively search for vulnerabilities and potential threats, which is vital for the early detection and prevention of breaches before they cause significant damage.
• Real-time monitoring and response: Both empower your security team to respond immediately to detected threats. Any suspicious activity — whether in your cloud environment or on an endpoint device — is quickly addressed, minimizing potential damage.
• Integration with other security measures: Both CDR and EDR can integrate into larger security frameworks, contributing to a comprehensive defense against cyber threats.
• Use of AI/ML: AI/machine learning (ML) technology enhances the detection capabilities of both CDR and EDR, enabling them to analyze vast datasets and automate responses to complex threats.

Integration of CDR and EDR in a unified security strategy

Does your organization leverage both cloud and on-premises environments? If so, then integrating CDR and EDR into a unified security strategy makes sense. Together, the two technologies can ensure both cloud-based and on-premises threat detection and response are covered.

A combined approach simplifies your management of security protocols. Bringing all parts of your security under a single strategic framework leads to quicker identification and response to threats. With better coordination between your cloud and endpoint security measures, you’re better positioned to:

• Optimize resource usage
• Reduce both mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR)
• Simplify the tasks of managing risk and maintaining compliance

CrowdStrike provides both CDR and EDR

CrowdStrike offers both CDR and EDR. CDR is built into CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security, and EDR at the core of CrowdStrike Falcon® Insight XDR.

CrowdStrike offers the only cloud detection and response that combines elite threat intelligence and 24/7 services on a unified cloud security platform. Meanwhile, Falcon Insight XDR focuses on real-time threat detection, automated analysis, and response, with EDR capabilities focusing specifically on endpoint device security.

To learn more about the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform, try out our interactive demo of Falcon Cloud Security or sign up for a free trial of Falcon Insight XDR.