Intrusion Detection/Intrusion Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS) are legacy security tools that were developed over 20 years ago to inspect network traffic to detect malicious activity.
However, for as long as IDS/IPS products have been deployed, they have generated complaints about their high volume of false positives and the ease with which threat actors can evade them.
And, as networks evolved to become more distributed and included cloud workloads, IDS/IPS were simply unable to protect the changing network environment. Some organizations upgraded their costly IDS/IPS to Network Detection and Response (NDR) to improve alert accuracy and threat visibility.
Unfortunately, with the continued evolution of networks, organizations looking to replace aging IDS/IPS need to look beyond NDR.
Replacing IDS/IPS with NDR Creates Significant Blind Spots
Enterprises face three common challenges when looking to replace their aging IDS/IPS with NDR tools:
- Widespread encryption: The pervasive adoption of encryption to meet Zero Trust requirements has left packet-based detection tools like NDR unable to detect threats. They were designed to inspect packets to identify malicious activity, yet most NDR sensors can only inspect unencrypted traffic. Unless an organization deploys complex decryption technology on any segment they wish to monitor, the NDR will be blind.
- High TCO of Appliances: Deploying NDR appliances to monitor activity across today’s widely distributed computing environment is prohibitively expensive to most enterprises. Appliance-based deployment models incur significant costs due to the need to size and acquire the correct physical or virtual appliances to scale with network growth, deploying, and configure and tune each appliance. After deployment, there are ongoing costs related to regularly updating and patching the software and firmware, and ultimately replacing the underlying hardware due to end-of-life.
- Multi-Cloud visibility: NDR deployed in cloud environments requires virtual sensors for traffic mirroring for threat detection, which is costly and complex to deploy. Those NDR vendors that can ingest cloud flow logs typically support only a subset of providers, creating major visibility gaps for multi-cloud customers as they try to aggregate and normalize disparate, non-standardized cloud flow logs.
Use Netography Fusion to Replace Aging IDS/IPS
To overcome the limitations of replacing IDS/IPS with NDR, look beyond technologies that rely on appliance-based inspection to monitor activity.
Netography Fusion® is a cloud-native Network Defense Platform (NDP). It provides complete, real-time visibility across multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments networks without deploying appliances, agents, or taps.
Fusion shows what your devices, users, applications, and data are doing and what’s happening to them, in real-time. You can detect active threats in your cloud and onprem networks, in IT, OT, and IoT environments, accelerating your ability to respond in real-time before they disrupt operations.
Fusion enables you to replace your IDS/IPS and other monitoring technologies with a single platform that delivers real-time awareness of anomalous and malicious activity across your entire network. Its customizable detection models deliver high-fidelity alerts that provide your teams with the actionable insights they need, not overwhelm them with noise.
Overcoming the Challenges of Inspection-Based Detection
Fusion provides greater visibility of anomalies and compromises in today’s encrypted, hybrid networks:
- Encryption Agnostic: Fusion is encryption agnostic because it analyzes enriched metadata, not packets. There’s no need for expensive decryption technology because Fusion can identify anomalies and compromises even in encrypted data, which eliminates a favorite technique employed by threat actors to evade detection by inspection-based technology.
- Low TCO: Because Fusion is a 100% SaaS platform and utilizes enriched metadata from devices and applications already in your network, it eliminates the expense and complexity of deploying appliances, sensors, or taps. Within minutes, you can see what your devices, users, applications, and data are doing and what’s happening to them in real-time, from a single platform.
- Multi-Cloud Simplicity: You can monitor all five major cloud platforms without the need to incur costly traffic mirroring or deploy additional tools: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Fusion aggregates and normalizes the different flow data to provide consistent, continuous visibility across your multi-cloud environments.
Fusion Compromise Detection and Threat Hunting Capabilities
Fusion continuously monitors enriched metadata from everywhere in your multi-cloud and on-prem network to enable you to detect, investigate, and respond faster to malicious activity that has evaded your security stack:
- North-South and East-West network traffic visibility monitors network traffic and device communications across your entire network, including on-prem infrastructure, between clouds, cloud to on-prem, and on-prem to remote locations.
- Integration with existing tech stack enables fast integration with response workflows with third-party products, including SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and ticketing systems.
- Centralized, user-customizable dashboards enable the creation of team-specific visualizations and security monitoring.
- Automatic context labeling with Context Creation Models (CCMs) that automatically create labels to identify assets or groups of assets, reducing the time to detect anomalies and malicious activity.
- 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 NDP, contact us for more information, a demo, or to get started with a trial.
About Netography
The center of security gravity has shifted to the cloud; your on-premises and cloud security needs to be cloud-native.
Netography Fusion® is a cloud-native Network Defense Platform (NDP) that accelerates your response to anomalies and threats across your hybrid, multi-cloud, and on-prem networks from a single console. Your security, network, and cloud operations teams will become more effective with unmatched traffic monitoring, detection, compromise detection and response, and governance without 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, A16Z, and more. For more information, visit netography.com.