Most large enterprises have embraced Zero Trust to reduce the risk of compromise for critical data and systems by external and internal threats. However, the process of moving from an implicit trust model to a Zero Trust model requires the adoption of a range of technologies that may take many years to deploy.
Among these technologies are pervasive data encryption and extensive network segmentation to minimize the “blast radius” from any compromise.
The result is that many enterprise networks have massive volumes of encrypted traffic traversing multi-cloud plus on-premises environments, with applications and data scattered across these environments.
Consequently, NetOps and SecOps teams have very little insight as to whether their Zero Trust implementations are actually working. The technologies that they have relied on in the past to monitor network activity, detect violations, and enforce policies are unable to do so in a Zero Trust environment.
Limitations of Verifying Zero Trust Effectiveness
Large enterprises face three common challenges when attempting to validate their Zero Trust implementation:
- Visibility Gaps: Teams struggle to consolidate all activity into a comprehensive view across their multicloud and hybrid networks. Pervasive encryption renders network detection and response (NDR) – and other tools that rely on deep packet inspection (DPI) – unable to detect policy violations and identify anomalous activity. In the cloud, providers vary in how they enable the ability to inspect and log traffic, and can require expensive approaches like traffic mirroring to monitor activity.
- Network Evolution: Adopting Zero Trust is a multi-year process, and during that time networks evolve as services, devices, applications, users, locations, and cloud providers change. This means that NetOps and SecOps, if not continuously validating their Zero Trust implementation as their network evolves, can have no idea if it is still functioning as intended and continuously enforcing policies.
- High TCO: For on-prem networks, the distributed nature of resources, applications, and users requires massive investment in appliance-based tools to monitor activity. And, the widespread use of encryption requires costly decryption technology to enable NDR and other packet inspection tools to work as intended. In the cloud, traditional monitoring tools need expensive traffic mirroring to collect and analyze activity. Also, differences between cloud providers require organizations to assume the additional expense of aggregating and normalizing disparate, non-standardized cloud flow logs to consolidate all activity into a single comprehensive view.
Use Netography Fusion for Verifying Your Zero Trust Policies
To overcome the challenges of validating and enforcing your Zero Trust deployment in the face of pervasive encryption and dynamic on-prem and multi-cloud networks, it is essential to look beyond traditional network monitoring approaches for both multi-cloud and hybrid networks.
Netography Fusion® is a cloud-native 100% SaaS platform. It provides complete, real-time visibility across your entire network without deploying appliances, agents, or taps.
Fusion enables you to validate that your Zero Trust implementation is working as intended across your hybrid network. You gain real-time awareness of the activities of your devices, users, applications, and data all from a single console, enabling you to respond to policy violations immediately.
Ensure Enforcement of Your Zero Trust Policies
Fusion addresses the challenges described above and removes the barriers to fast, effective detection and response to Zero Trust policy violations:
- Unmatched awareness: Fusion consolidates and analyzes enriched metadata from disparate sources across your hybrid environment in a single console, eliminating swivel-chair analysis. Real-time visualizations show you what is happening to devices, users, applications, and data across workloads and environments. Intuitive querying capabilities and high-fidelity insights accelerate response to policy violations.
- Governance: Fusion unifies governance across all multi-cloud and hybrid networks to enable continuous monitoring, validation, and enforcement of trust boundaries in your Zero Trust implementation. Even as your network evolves Fusion detects anomalies, policy violations, and compromises within trust environments in real-time (not just during periodic audits). Its frictionless architecture eliminates the need to deploy additional appliances as your network evolves. Actionable intelligence informs and validates policy decisions and enables comprehensive, rapid response before operational disruptions or breaches occur.
- Low TCO: Because Fusion is a 100% SaaS platform and utilizes enriched metadata from devices and applications already in your network, eliminating the expense and complexity of deploying appliances. The analysis of enriched metadata – not packets – means that Fusion is encryption agnostic, so there’s no need for expensive decryption technology. Within minutes, Fusion shows you what your devices, users, applications, and data are doing and what’s happening to them in real-time, from a single console.
Fusion Monitoring Capabilities
Gain unmatched visibility into your Zero Trust to mitigate security and operational risks in real-time:
- North-South and East-West network traffic visibility detects lateral movement, policy violations, and anomalous behavior.
- Integration with existing tech stack accelerates response workflows with third-party products, including SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and ticketing systems.
- Centralized, user-customizable dashboards eliminate the need for multiple consoles to monitor devices, users, applications, and data across your hybrid network
- Automatic context labeling with Context Creation Models (CCMs) that automatically create labels to identify assets or groups of assets and simplify detection of Zero Trust anomalies and policy violations.
- User-configurable detection & response with Netography Detection Models (NDMs) that pinpoint anomalous activity and enable multiple response workflows from a single NDM.
- Common language of Netography Query Language (NQL) eliminates silos with a uniform detection, analysis, and reporting framework.
- Flexible licensing and data retention to tailor your license to your requirements.
If you’d like to learn more about our Netography Fusion, contact us for more information, a demo, or to get started with a trial.
About Netography
Netography is the leader in using context-enriched metadata to detect activity that should never happen in your multi-cloud or hybrid network. Netography Fusion is a 100% SaaS, cloud-native platform that provides real-time detection and response to compromises and anomalies at scale, without the burden of deploying sensors, agents, or taps.
Based in Annapolis, MD, Netography® is backed by some of the world’s leading venture firms, including Bessemer Venture Partners, SYN Ventures, and A16Z.