Before Vision One, we had limited visibility into our security posture. Things were happening all around us, but we couldn't see them. With Vision One, we have centralized visibility and management across all of our protection layers, so we can see and respond to threats quickly and effectively.
I cannot imagine my day-to-day operations without the visibility that Vision One provides. It makes all the difference. No other platform compares to Vision One in terms of simplicity, ease of use, and importance.
Vision One has improved our efficiency with centralized visibility. Before Vision One, we had to go to different platforms and tools in our environment. Sometimes the information was missing and sometimes we were searching with the wrong terms. But because I can now see everything at once, it has helped. The decision we are making now is simply to go there, and whatever we have been faced with, the console is enough to make a decision.
We just signed a contract for Managed XDR services. We were managing our security before, but we'll start using their managed services next year. We've received a few escalations from them already, but that's because they're proactively searching for threats, which is a good thing. For example, I got an escalation from them last week for something that we wouldn't have discovered on our own. It wasn't something that the tool would have generated an alert for either, because it was very similar to what a user would normally do. But they were able to find it because they're looking into all of the addresses that they have. This led to us being able to control incidents that would have happened otherwise.
The XDR service has saved us time, enabling us to work on other tasks. The environment is quite complex, so before we had XDR, we didn't have any tool that considered all possibilities or provided any visibility into our environment. When we first started using the tool, it was new to us, but after a couple of years of using it, we've found that it is a legitimate tool that provides valuable information. Instead of seeing it as adding more work to our workload, we see it as helping us to be more proactive and prevent future incidents. For me, it has been a great help and has added real value to our work.
XDR helped us reduce our time to detect and respond to threats. With a single click, I can isolate a computer from the rest of the compliant environment. I had to do this last week when I had to support two escalated computers. Without XDR, there would be hundreds of things that we would not have seen or known about. But with XDR, we can see everything. And that even includes coverage of devices or computers that are not owned by us, such as those used by vendors. If a vendor brings a malicious device onto the property and downloads something malicious, we can detect it as early as possible.
Trend Micro XDR has helped us reduce the time we spend investigating false positive alerts. I am 100 percent confident that everything that comes out of the platform is legitimate. We had a few false positives when we first started using the solution, but because Trend Micro allows us to whitelist specific items, we were able to build our policy accordingly. Sometimes, there are malicious items that we need to allow because of our environment, such as certain security tools. Trend Micro allows us to build a policy that excludes these items from alerts, so we no longer receive alerts for them.
We use the XDR automation capabilities extensively, including playbook automation for tasks like isolating computers, and API-based automation for most other tasks. For example, we are a member of the retail ISAC information-sharing platform, and we have automated scripts from that platform that pull in all malicious senders, IPs, and domains, and pool them into XDR. XDR then automatically scans all computers to see if any of these malicious entities exist. If they do, XDR generates an alert and allows us to take action, such as removing the file. We generally set XDR to allow only, so that we have visibility into all malicious activity, even if we don't take action on it.