MDR, EDR, XDR, SIEM, SOAR—What Do They All Mean for B2B eCommerce?

With transactions, marketing activities, promotions, and interactions between businesses predominantly taking place online, cyber security has only grown in importance. B2B ecommerce brands, regardless of how niche their client bases are, must not overlook their risk management and cyber defense strategies. They need strong cybersecurity strategies and tools, and shouldn’t cut corners just to save money.

With statistics pointing to increasing numbers of cybercrime taking place each year (totalling $13.82 trillion by 2028), B2B brands—particularly when handling online transactions in high numbers—must proactively reduce their attack surfaces and risk exposure.

As these types of ecommerce organizations occupy and deploy more web properties, APIs, cloud-based assets, remote devices, and other systems to enable more real-time collaboration and decision-making, their risk profiles expand exponentially. For scaling B2B businesses especially, they may espouse that their assets offer little to no benefit to an opportunistic cybercriminal, but even just one vulnerability can be exploited, and all client, vendor, and partner data stored on file is, therefore, at risk.

Cyber threats are growing at an alarming rate, in both frequency and severity, so all organizations – however established – must take proactive steps to safeguard data, information, and assets. With most ecommerce brands operating with a hybrid or entirely online infrastructure, this warrants enterprise-grade security solutions that offer optimum protection.

This doesn’t have to exclusively warrant the recruitment of in-house security teams; but rather, leveraging solutions like managed detection and response (MDR), and its sister solutions, endpoint detection and response (EDR) and extended detection and response (XDR). These solutions – combined with SIEM and SOAR platforms – will provide ecommerce brands with the real-time monitoring, threat detection, and automated response capabilities needed to mitigate many sophisticated and highly covert cyber attacks. This guide will explain what all of these acronyms mean, how they interact with each other, and what they mean for a B2B ecommerce enterprise going forward.

The Threat Landscape Facing B2B eCommerce Brands Today

Before we talk about solutions, let’s understand the dangers B2B ecommerce brands face online. These threats are diverse and growing, coming from different attackers and targeting various parts of their online systems. These include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Financially-motivated threats—Cybercriminals deploy ransomware that disrupts and locks down systems until ransoms are paid. Brands sector-wide are susceptible to this (85% of attacks target small businesses) along with business email compromise scams and scraping attacks to steal funds, credit card information and payment data. With malicious actors driven by monetary gain, many of them are constantly innovating their techniques and businesses are, regretfully, finding it harder to detect them on their own.
• Supply chain threats—Third-party vendor vulnerabilities open backdoors for attackers to gain access and exfiltrate sensitive customer and financial data. This is made easier when suppliers in developing economies – often without access to reliable technology and infrastructure – lack sufficient protections and cyber knowledge.
• Insider threats—Disgruntled or negligent employees, contractors, and partners on the inside often represent a huge security risk. This could result in calculated data or intellectual property leaks, or the illegal disbursement of funds. 88% of cyber attacks are the result of human error, according to Stanford University research, which says a lot about the pervasive knowledge and skills gap that businesses want to be addressed. Fundamentally, however, vulnerabilities are exploited through convincing phishing or malware scams that lure users into divulging information or logins or making payments to third parties disguised as known brands or people.
• Infrastructure threats—All interconnected cloud software, endpoints, networks and operating systems are prone to ransomware, DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, brute force attacks, software vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and more. Irregular and unsupervised patching and backups often pave the way for attackers to weave their way in easily.

This complex and extensive attack surface necessitates having enterprise-grade detection and response capabilities to achieve cyber resilience.

Bridging the eCommerce Security Gap with MDR, EDR, and XDR

Many ecommerce brands rely solely on traditional endpoint antivirus, firewalls, VPNs, or legacy SIEM solutions that are siloed and lack cohesive integration. But as threats outpace these defenses, companies need greater visibility into threats and risks across hybrid digital environments.

While hospitality and retail brands may optimize their infrastructure to make customer or client experiences more inclusive, seamless, and personalized—combining business intelligence, marketing and retargeting strategies—it’s important that all vendor security be managed from the top down. Enterprise-grade security solutions like the aforementioned MDR, EDR, and XDR, in some combination, will offer faster threat detection leveraging analytics and machine learning, and expert incident response services.

What is MDR?

• Managed Detection and Response (MDR) solutions provide 24/7 threat monitoring, detection, investigations and response delivered as a managed service by a team of third-party cyber security experts, often leveraging a cloud-based platform.
• MDR services ingest telemetry data from networks, cloud (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS), and on-premises infrastructure to provide comprehensive threat visibility and detection coverage. They are powered by behavioral analytics, machine learning, threat intelligence feeds, and more.
• When threats are detected, the provider’s SOC (security operations center) team conducts forensic investigations and rapid response actions like containment, eradication and recovery guided in line with established incident response policies.

What is EDR?

• Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) offers visibility into threats targeting employee computing devices (laptops, desktops, servers) both on and off the organization’s network. Advanced EDR solutions prevent malware infections, malicious scripts, and file-less attacks, to name just a few.
• Key EDR capabilities include real-time endpoint monitoring, pattern analysis, registry monitoring, advanced search, and both automatic and manual response actions across individual or groups of endpoints.
• EDR provides continuous protection and often serves as the launch point for further investigation by MDR services during larger incidents. Integration between EDR and MDR solutions often maximizes efficiency and lowers costs for brands with a hybrid or physical space.

What is XDR?

• Extended Detection and Response (XDR) expands threat detection and containment beyond unmanaged endpoints to ingest data from other data sources like email, networks, the cloud, identity providers, and more. The result is holistic enterprise-wide threat visibility and cross-vector detection in a single unified platform.
• Correlating data across traditionally siloed sources enables XDR solutions to uncover the full scope of multi-stage attacks where lateral movement is key for threat actors to compromise environments. XDR makes that much harder to initiate from their end.

Integrating MDR, EDR, and XDR with SIEM and SOAR

To achieve maximum value from MDR, EDR or XDR deployments, ecommerce brands should consider integrating these solutions into other security platforms.

• SIEM (security information and event management) solutions aggregate, analyze and correlate real-time log data from multiple security tools to provide security analytics dashboards, alerts and compliance reporting. It’s not autonomous; it requires management and oversight.
• SOAR (security orchestration, automation and response) platforms allow organizations to codify and automate repetitive, manual security workflows – like threat hunting, triaging alerts or executing common response actions – enabling under-staffed security teams to focus on more strategic tasks.
• Often, MDR and XDR involve a third-party security team deploying their own native SIEM or SOAR solution. Collectively, security experts are trained and equipped to contextualize security data to help prioritize alerts and trigger the appropriate responses.

So what does this mean for B2B ecommerce brands? What do they need to do to enhance their security posture?

As B2B ecommerce transactions and online activity explode, strong security solutions are crucial. These solutions provide the visibility and control needed to navigate today’s dangerous cyber landscape. B2B brands should seek expert help to strengthen their defenses and reduce their vulnerability to attacks.

How OroCommerce Aids B2B eCommerce Security

Digital commerce solutions like OroCommerce contain built-in capabilities that strengthen B2B ecommerce security across business processes. While the solutions provide ecommerce businesses with a reliable, user-friendly platform that automates transactions and scales, it is inherently secure, patched, updated, and tested to safeguard all incumbent data.

• OroCommerce delivers a consistently relevant and up-to-date buying experience, supported by strong application updates. Regular patches address software vulnerabilities in areas like input validation, authentication, access control, session management, and output encoding. This ensures that integrated apps and APIs remain encrypted and protected from compromise.
• OroCommerce helps businesses manage who can access sensitive data, like personal information or intellectual property. This is achieved through features like role-based access control, multi-factor authentication, and single sign-on (SSO). These features verify all access requests and block unauthorized users from entering secured systems.
• OroCommerce also provides tools to comply with global privacy regulations, such as GDPR, ensuring customer data is protected.
• OroCommerce CRM offers insights into business transactions, including customer details, order history, and account status. This visibility empowers security teams to detect suspicious activity more effectively.

Protecting Your B2B eCommerce Business: A Clear Path Forward

While cybersecurity can seem complex, one thing is clear: comprehensive security solutions are essential for B2B ecommerce brands to grow safely and confidently. Combining advanced threat detection and response tools (like MDR, XDR, and EDR) with a secure and reliable business platform like OroCommerce provides the best foundation for success. This way, you can focus on growing your business with complete peace of mind about your security.