The Enterprise Market Shift to Network Defense Platform
By Martin Roesch, CEO
The architectures of enterprise networks have changed irrevocably over the past four years and with that, our approach to network monitoring and protection must as well. For any doubters out there, the pandemic put an exclamation point on the lack of suitability of static, on-premise architectures. The bifurcated treatment of the cloud and legacy technologies for addressing the problems of securing enterprise networks as they are now catalyzed the need for new approaches.
The Network Defense Platform (NDP) is the end result of recognizing the obsolescence of the historical approaches to providing network defense in on-prem and cloud environments and their diminishing ROI, while at the same time acknowledging that the cloud cannot be treated in a piecemeal fashion by enterprise security teams. Netography pioneered the evolution with our cloud-native NDP: Netography Fusion®. Based on modern architecture, it’s a new approach to network defense that reflects that the center of gravity for network monitoring and security has shifted to the cloud.
Analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group recently issued a report on the need for an NDP and why enterprises should consider one. Other vendors have also noticed the need for a different architecture, including Cynamics, Stellar Cyber, Lumu, Mixmode, and Valtix. I would include them as part of this evolution to NDP. Some of these vendors are trying to achieve the benefits of NDP. However, they are still trying to push their customers to use appliances and agents as core components of their approach.
Attuned to the dynamic nature of modern enterprise networks, part of the superiority of cloud-native architectures is that they can quickly bring forth high-value features as needed, without requiring that users wait for version releases of systems to be developed, deployed, integrated, and updated. When a SaaS offering gets updated, everyone gets the benefits of the new features and developments instantly and everywhere without having to do anything on their end. It’s core to what is needed right now. They can also be deployed on a moment’s notice anywhere their capability is needed. This “anywhere, anytime” deployment is unprecedented in network security: never has so much capability been so deployable into any part of an enterprise network with such a low barrier to implementation.
Replace Obsolete Approaches and Reduce TCO
Netography Fusion treats your Atomized Network as a composite of its parts and not as a bunch of separate networks with separate solutions required to try to figure out what is happening to your devices, users, applications, and data. You can pinpoint anomalous and malicious activity in real-time across your entire network from a single console. And it lives off the land using enriched metadata, not packets, eliminating the need to deploy appliances, sensors, taps, and agents.
Practically speaking, this means that our customers are, among other things, able to:
- Replace legacy flow monitoring tools: As a 100% SaaS platform, Fusion provides unified visibility across on-prem and multi-cloud environments, and customizable detection models and dashboards for SecOps, NetOps, and CloudOps teams’ requirements.
- Upgrade outdated IDS/IPS technology: Fusion eliminates costly, cumbersome tools that offer limited functionality, create noise, and have a limited scope into what they can see, with real-time detection capability that is encryption agnostic.
- Avoid expensive appliances for NDR: Fusion provides enterprise-wide, real-time visibility of malicious activity everywhere NDR isn’t deployed, across diverse networking environments, in less than an hour and with a low TCO.
- Adopt real-time cloud traffic monitoring: Fusion detects anomalous workload activity before operational disruptions occur without the need for a slow store-and-query data lake and supports all five major cloud platforms and on-prem environments in a single console.
Netography Fusion leverages a modern architecture to replace or improve obsolete approaches to network defense with updated capabilities in one place. It’s a fundamentally different approach to attacking the network security problem in modern enterprises, and it is succeeding where existing bifurcated cloud + appliance-based legacy architectures fail. Our customers tell us they are able to simplify and extend security where and when they need it, at a lower TCO, and achieve a better ROI.
Want to learn more about what a Network Defense Platform (NDP) can do for you? Join Martin Roesch and John Grady, principal cybersecurity analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, for a live discussion on Wednesday, Sept. 27, at 1 p.m. ET. Sign up.