Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS) were developed decades ago to detect malicious activity in network traffic.
However, since their deployment, IDS/IPS products have consistently faced complaints regarding their high volume of false positives and the ease with which threat actors can evade their signature-based detection.
IDS/IPS struggled to protect this changing network environment as networks became more distributed and incorporated multiple cloud platforms. Many organizations upgraded their outdated IDS/IPS to Network Detection and Response (NDR) to enhance detection by leveraging AI/ML.
Unfortunately, as networks continue to evolve, organizations looking to replace aging IDS/IPS must look beyond traditional NDR.
Replacing IDS/IPS with Traditional NDR Won’t Eliminate Detection Gaps
Replacing your IDS/IPS with traditional NDR tools won’t eliminate detection gaps for three reasons:
- Multi-Cloud Visibility: NDR vendors that can ingest cloud flow logs typically support only a subset of providers, creating significant visibility gaps for multi-cloud customers as they try to aggregate and analyze disparate, non-standardized cloud flow log sources.
- High TCO of Sensors, Probes, or Taps: Deploying physical or virtual appliances to monitor all activity across a widely distributed computing environment is prohibitively expensive. Security architects are forced to choose where to deploy a limited number of appliances, leaving significant portions of the network unmonitored.
- Widespread Encryption: The pervasive adoption of encryption to meet Zero Trust requirements has left packet-based detection tools like IDS/IPS and NDR unable to detect active threat actors. They were designed to inspect packets to identify malicious content, yet NDR sensors can only inspect unencrypted traffic. Unless an organization deploys complex decryption technology on any segment it wishes to monitor, the payload of any packet will be hidden from its NDR.
Replace Aging IDS/IPS with Netography Fusion
To overcome the limitations of replacing your IDS/IPS sensors with NDR, look beyond detection and response technologies that rely on packet inspection to monitor activity.
Netography Fusion® is a cloud-native, 100% SaaS platform that enables you to replace your outdated IDS/IPS with a single platform without sensors or taps.
The Fusion platform gives you a holistic view of all anomalous and malicious network activity across your multi-cloud, single-cloud, or hybrid network. Fusion applies AI-powered analytics to context-enriched metadata (VPC & VNet flow logs, on-prem flow logs, and DNS logs) to detect unwanted activity.
Fusion’s frictionless architecture starts monitoring in minutes or hours because it eliminates the burden of deploying sensors or agents. You can monitor any part of your network without having to consider where to locate physical or virtual appliances.
Your SecOps, CloudOps, and NetOps teams see lateral movement, data exfiltration from ransomware, and trust boundary violations in real-time. Over 300 fully customizable detection models deliver high-fidelity, high-confidence alerts. Your operations teams receive the actionable insights they need without being bombarded with noise.
Overcoming the Challenges of Inspection-Based Detection
- Multi-Cloud Simplicity: You can monitor all five major cloud platforms—AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Oracle—without the need to incur costly traffic mirroring or deploy additional tools. Fusion aggregates and normalizes the different flow data to provide consistent, continuous observability across your multi-cloud or hybrid network.
- Low TCO: Fusion is a 100% SaaS platform that eliminates the expense and complexity of deploying physical or virtual appliances or taps. It analyzes context-enriched metadata from devices and applications already in your network. Within minutes, you can start to see what your devices, users, applications, and data are doing and what’s happening to them in real-time, from a single platform.
- Encryption Agnostic: Fusion is agnostic to encryption because it analyzes enriched metadata, not packets. There’s no need for expensive decryption technology because Fusion can identify anomalous and malicious activity, even in encrypted data. This approach eliminates a favorite technique employed by threat actors to evade detection by inspection-based technology.
Fusion NDR Capabilities
Fusion continuously monitors context-enriched metadata from everywhere in your multi-cloud and on-prem network to enable you to detect, investigate, and respond faster to anomalous and malicious activity:
- Detect activity across your entire network, including on-prem infrastructure, between clouds, cloud to on-prem, and on-prem to remote locations.
- Detect active threat actors in your cloud and on-prem networks and in your IT, OT, and IoT environments
- Automate response workflows with third-party product integrations, including SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and ticketing systems.
- Customizable dashboards enable your operations teams to create specific visualizations they need, minimizing learning curves.
- Flexible detection & response policies with user-configurable Netography Detection Models (NDMs) that pinpoint the anomalous or malicious activity you need to detect.
- Flexible licensing and data retention options that tailor your license to your requirements.
Next Steps
If you’d like to learn more about Netography Fusion, start your free trial today or contact us for more information.
About Netography
Netography is the leader in holistic network security and observability. The Netography Fusion® platform is the fastest and easiest way to detect anomalous and malicious activity in your multicloud, single-cloud, or hybrid network. Fusion is a 100% SaaS, cloud-native platform that provides frictionless detection and response to compromises and anomalies at scale in real-time without the burden of deploying sensors, agents, or taps.
Based in Annapolis, MD, Netography® is backed by leading venture firms, including Bessemer Venture Partners, SYN Ventures, and A16Z. For more information, visit netography.com.