From Alerts to Answers: Unlocking XDR’s Full Potential with Forensic Visibility
This guest blog post is authored by Marie Wilcox, VP Marketing at Binalyze, a company that provides an automated investigation platform purpose-built to bring forensic depth and speed into everyday incident response. Binalyze AIR seamlessly integrates with existing SOC tooling—including XDR platforms—to automate evidence collection, streamline collaboration, and deliver conclusive investigations at scale. Trusted by leading enterprises, MSSPs, and IR consultants worldwide, Binalyze empowers organizations to respond with clarity and confidence.
"It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong." — John Maynard Keynes
As organizations race to improve their detection and response capabilities, Extended Detection and Response (XDR) has become a cornerstone of modern SOC strategy. By consolidating signals and orchestrating response actions across disparate systems, XDR promises clarity and speed. But a persistent question remains: how can security teams move from correlation to confirmation—from alerts to answers?
This is where forensic-level visibility becomes indispensable.
XDR’s evolution: from detection to conclusion
XDR delivers exceptional breadth—correlating endpoint, network, identity, and cloud telemetry to detect anomalies and threats. Yet what happens next often involves a pivot: analysts must leave the XDR interface, launch investigations in separate tools, and manually piece together a story. That transition is where critical time is lost and confidence is often compromised.
By embedding forensic capability directly into the XDR workflow, organizations can drastically reduce dwell time and investigation lag. Forensic evidence—collected automatically and enriched contextually—provides the depth needed to validate alerts, uncover root causes, and scope impact with precision.
This evolution is not about replicating traditional digital forensics but reimagining it for scalable, operational use. It makes forensics usable and effective in the heat of an investigation—not days later during post-incident review.
The value of forensic context in the SOC
Incorporating digital forensics into detection and response workflows isn’t about adding more data. It’s about providing the right evidence, at the right time, to the right team. This shift delivers three key benefits:
Reducing ambiguity: Even high-fidelity alerts can lack conclusive proof. Forensic artifacts—like memory snapshots, disk data, and execution traces—help confirm or dismiss alerts with confidence.
Accelerating scoping and containment: Forensic data shows not just what triggered the alert, but what preceded and followed it. That means faster scoping, smarter containment, and fewer missed indicators.
Strengthening collaboration: Timeline-based views, enriched event metadata, and standardized evidence packages improve coordination between SOC analysts, IR teams, compliance officers, and legal stakeholders.
This depth is particularly vital as adversaries continue to evolve. The 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) shows that “System Intrusion” breaches—complex attacks often involving ransomware—now top all patterns, accounting for 36% of breaches, with 70% involving ransomware and 92% of industries impacted by extortion campaigns.
From reactive investigation to real-time resolution
Historically, forensic analysis was reserved for major incidents—initiated manually, executed by experts, and time-intensive by design. But today's threat landscape no longer allows for that luxury.
Security teams need conclusive evidence at the point of detection, not hours or days later. Forensic insight must be automated, accessible, and orchestrated into workflows. That means forensic collection triggered by alert rules. Evidence centralized and enriched in minutes. Timelines built dynamically across systems.
When investigations can begin immediately—before attacker lateral movement, before data exfiltration, before ransomware detonation—the balance of power begins to shift.
And with SOCs under increasing pressure—facing talent shortages, data overload, and burnout—removing manual, repetitive investigative work helps teams focus on what matters: decisive action.
A new mindset: from alerts to answers
Security leaders are already expanding their remit. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 45% of CISOs will oversee broader risk domains due to increasing regulatory demands and attack surface complexity. In this context, alerting alone is not enough. Evidence-based resolution is becoming the new benchmark.
Forensic visibility isn’t a “nice to have” bolted onto the end of an investigation—it’s a force multiplier that drives faster, more accurate, and more collaborative response across the entire SOC.
As XDR matures, expect to see forensic automation become a standard—helping organizations shift from correlation to clarity, and from signal to certainty.
Binalyze & Cisco
Cisco’s recently enhanced XDR solution is embracing this evolution. This enables users of Cisco XDR to go beyond detection—triggering real-time forensic collections, enriching alerts with deep context, and accelerating investigations without leaving the platform.
It’s a forward-thinking step that reflects a shared vision: making full-cycle, forensic-driven investigation a native part of integrated detection and response architectures.