Are Companies Buying Cybersecurity Solutions or Just "Abbreviations"?

The rapid innovation process and marketing strategies in the security industry make it increasingly difficult to identify the solutions companies need to protect their infrastructure. According to WatchGuard's evaluations, the basis of this confusion of concepts affecting product decisions and security strategies is actually a single goal, namely the "Detection and Response" (D&R) paradigm. Emphasizing that the traditional "block everything" approach is insufficient against modern and complex threats, WatchGuard Turkey and Greece Country Manager Yusuf Evmez states that the D&R approach is an operational model required to quickly detect threats and minimize damage, rather than a stand-alone product. Evmez points out that, regardless of the name of the product, all active systems must follow a common security cycle consisting of the steps of collecting signals, detecting, prioritizing, intervening and improving signals.

Tag-Focused Investments Create Vulnerabilities

According to WatchGuard's analysis, decision-makers are considering security such as EDR (Endpoint), NDR (Network), MDR (Managed Service) and XDR (Extended). When they cannot clearly identify the differences between categories, their purchasing processes are often shaped by the acronym that sounds "most suitable for the future" or brands with high marketing power. For example, while an institution may think that it is investing in "XDR" to unify all detection processes, it may be limited to only an advanced EDR platform during the implementation phase. Similarly, businesses that receive "MDR" services may mistakenly believe that they do not need an in-house Security Operations Center (SOC), and this can only be noticed in the event of a real cyber attack.

 “Conceptual Confusion Slows the Adoption of Security Tools”

The cyber security industry is creating a new acronym every day, complicating the Detection and Response market. WatchGuard Turkey and Greece Country Manager Yusuf Evmez said, "Customers are naturally negatively affected by this situation. Often the same security terms can have different meanings depending on the supplier offering it. This not only creates confusion in IT teams, but also slows down the adoption of critical tools that are expected to increase companies' security visibility." he said.

4 Strategic Steps for the Right Security Investment

Yusuf Evmez states that institutions should focus on the basic functions behind the labels in order to move away from this complexity and establish the most accurate cyber security infrastructure, and suggests 4 strategic steps to be taken by IT leaders.

1. Focus on capacity, not categories.Demand that vendors match the features of their solutions to your organization's actual use cases. Analyze whether a new concept is truly an innovative technology or just a renaming.

2. Standardize your internal terminology. Clarify what your security team expects from concepts such as EDR, MDR or XDR specifically for your own infrastructure, not what is understood in the market in general, and put these standards in writing. Prioritize integration and response capability. Any detection that is not supported by a meaningful and rapid response capability only creates operational noise in the system. Evaluate how effectively the system or service provider you will invest in can take action.

4. Question the fundamental need beyond acronyms. Each new category in the industry emerges to fill a real gap, be it cloud proliferation, identity-focused attacks, or network visibility. Instead of memorizing labels, identify real gaps in your own system.