Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platforms are becoming a nerve center of the modern Security Operations Center (SOC). By correlating threat signals across endpoints, cloud workloads, identity, and networks, XDR delivers incredible power to detect and respond to attacks in real time. Many organizations have either started to invest in an XDR platform, or they are beginning their journey exploring these solutions.
These solutions aim to tell you what happened at every step of the attacker’s journey and remediate the threats. Many XDR solutions promise the inclusion of identity context and telemetry, but the scope of what is provided is often incomplete. This is a critical gap where Identity Attack Surface Management (IASM) solutions can provide the missing context, turning high-volume alerts into high-confidence decisions.
Threat vs. Posture
To understand how IASM enhances XDR, let’s understand their different but complementary missions:
- XDR Promises End-to-End Threat Detection and Response: Its purpose is to analyze real-time event streams to find anomalies and active threats. It answers questions like: “Is a user trying to dump credentials from memory right now?” or “Did this endpoint just make a suspicious connection to a C2 server?”
- IASM Telemetry Helps Minimize False Positives: Its purpose is to continuously map the entire identity fabric to understand relationships, entitlements, and potential attack paths before they are exploited. It answers questions like: “Is this user account supposed to have standing administrative privileges?” or “Does this service account’s permissions create a toxic combination that gives it an indirect path to our crown jewels?” This telemetry often can be used as a powerful signal to indicate to an XDR solution that these identities are at higher risk of compromise
From Raw Alert to Enriched Intelligence
Let’s move from theory to practice. Consider a common alert that floods SOCs daily and see how IASM telemetry transforms it.
A Standard XDR Alert: A SOC analyst receives a medium-priority alert: “Anomalous Logon Detected for ‘svc-data-pipeline’ on a non-standard endpoint.” An analyst seeing this has many questions. Is this a real threat or a false positive from a developer running a test? Is it urgent? Is the account newly created or an existing account? The investigation begins, consuming valuable time.
The Same Alert Enriched by IASM Telemetry: With an IASM integration, the alert is automatically enriched in the XDR platform before the analyst even sees it. CRITICAL PRIORITY: Anomalous Logon Detected for ‘svc-data-pipeline’ on a non-standard endpoint. IASM context includes:
- Identity Type: Non-Human Service Account.
- Permissions State: Possesses standing, over-privileged access to production cloud storage buckets.
- Hygiene Status: Credentials have not been rotated in 500+ days.
- Blast Radius: Critical. If compromised, this account has access to sensitive customer PII.
- Known Identity Indicator: This account has existed for two days and is known to be associated with threat actor X.
Suddenly, this is no longer a routine alert. It’s an unambiguous, high-priority incident. The IASM context has eliminated guesswork, allowing the SOC to bypass investigation and move directly to a targeted, high-confidence response.
Where IASM Extends XDR’s Native Identity Capabilities
Even as XDR platforms ingest more identity signals from a growing list of integrated sources, they are still looking at the world through a real-time threat lens without as much surrounding context. An IASM platform provides this missing context by:
- Identity Data Gaps: It provides a universal view of all identities—human and non-human—across every cloud, SaaS application, and on-prem system, not just the systems XDR is directly monitoring.
- Revealing “Dormant” Risk: It identifies pre-existing conditions that make an attack possible, such as standing privileges, toxic permission combinations, and poor identity hygiene, which are posture issues, not active threats.
- Quantifying Business Impact: By mapping out the “blast radius” for any given identity, it helps the SOC instantly understand the business context of a compromise and prioritize accordingly.
Conclusion
Your XDR platform is essential for winning the real-time fight against attackers. But winning the fight requires more than just seeing the punch; it requires understanding the opponent’s strategy.
By integrating a dedicated IASM platform, you enrich your XDR’s powerful threat detection engine with deep, structural identity context. You empower your security team to move faster, reduce alert fatigue, and focus on the incidents that pose a genuine, critical risk to the business. Don’t just detect threats; understand the identity specific vulnerabilities that make them possible. That is how you turn a great detection and response program into an unbeatable one.
