When thinking about the defining assets of a modern organization, people might think of buildings, machinery, patents, or other easily observable objects. Do you think of networks in the same way? If you don’t, you should. Without reliable, secure networks, businesses today will struggle to progress and meet the expectations and goals of clients and stakeholders alike.
Securing networks has never been more important. The number of breaches—and the costs associated with them—keeps going up. Enterprises must find a way to mitigate threats, both for capital and reputational preservation. Protecting networks through a variety of security measures is essential. Which ones make the most sense is the real question. Network detection and response (NDR) is one of the top options for safeguarding networks. Here’s how NDR eliminates network blind spots to deliver superior protection.
What Is NDR?
Network detection and response (NDR) is a popular security tool for keeping enterprise networks safer from malicious threats. It works by utilizing a variety of technologies and human actors, across a range of network layers.
A great NDR will be comprehensive when it comes to identifying and stopping threats on organizational networks. A combination of security tools and analysts work together to create a safe network ecosystem. While the more specific details will be discussed later, there’s one thing to understand now about NDR: its delivery can vary depending on organizational needs, which also affects absolute performance.
Some will want to use an unmanaged solution, while others will opt for a managed one. The difference between these is pretty simple, when you have a managed solution, any activity will be sent up and remediated through the NDR provider, which, if you have good one, will employ some of the best security analysts and engineers in the world. With an unmanaged solution, the enterprise will have to deal with threat intervention without assistance. While unmanaged services are going to be less expensive on their face, this doesn’t factor in the costs of hiring new employees in order to deal specifically with NDR. Each enterprise needs to decide on their own if it makes more sense to go with an unmanaged or managed option—as there are merits to both.
To further comprehend how NDR helps reduce network blind spots, it’s essential to look more closely at some of its specific capabilities.
How Does NDR Eliminate Network Blind Spots?
Now that you have an understanding of what NDR is and how it generally keeps networks safer, let’s investigate specifically how it eliminates network blind spots. There are quite a few ways NDR accomplishes this task, which is what makes it such a desirable security product.
There are three main security stack levels that go into a typical NDR: firewall, secure web gateway, and a dedicated IDS sensor. An NDR is built this way in order to increase the likelihood of detecting and stopping a threat, regardless of its current position. Through a comprehensive monitoring and visualization system, it’s possible to uncover risks across the board. This is the first major way NDR acts to eliminate network blind spots.
As you just learned, NDR works by introducing security features at several different points. Another way NDR helps eliminate network blind spots is by allowing for both wide and granular views of network activity.
Any great NDR solution is going to offer superior monitoring capabilities. This will allow stakeholders and managers to get a wide view of how networks are functioning, as well as their current security status. At the same time, it’s possible to drill down to the level of viewing the details of individual packets. Having such broad visibility can keep everyone current on exactly what they need to know about network functioning—otherwise known as eliminating blind spots.
In the previous section, there was a brief discussion about the differences between managed and unmanaged NDR. This comes back into play here, as managed NDR can certainly help cut out network blind spots. With a managed NDR solution, you’re getting some of the industry’s best talent on your team. These highly capable analysts will continually safeguard your networks from whatever comes its way. While you can certainly build a quality internal team as well, most organizations aren’t going to have anywhere near the scale to do this with any kind of capital efficiency versus what’s offered by a managed solution.
The incorporation of next-gen technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, is an additional way NDR can close your network blind spots. By leveraging these advanced tools, enterprises with a great NDR service will be able to confidently say they know what’s happening on their networks. Through the ongoing refining process of AI and ML, your defenses will get better with time, as they’ll be able to find anomalies right away in a highly mapped system.
What Will Determine if NDR Is a Worthwhile Investment?
There are two main ways enterprises need to think about an investment in NDR—especially when focusing on the idea of eliminating network blind spots. First, ask if this investment will help ensure the security of networks and critical data? And second: How will this affect the operational bottom line?
To be sure, there are plenty of great network security tools out there today; but it suffices to say that the first of these questions has already been answered in previous sections. There’s ample proof showing that NDR will help organizations identify and close network vulnerabilities. But what about this second aspect?
When you consider the average cost of a data breach today is well over $4 million, it really puts the need for adequate network security into perspective. A great NDR has he potential to pay for itself, as it can play an important role in mitigating these potential costs. Furthermore, stopping a breach earlier can also massively reduce final costs, which is another reason why the blind spot-eliminating capabilities of NDR can be so useful.
Enterprises today can’t afford to leave their networks exposed to the ever-changing threats out there. While it’s easy to believe your organization is doing enough, often, this isn’t the case. If it were, there would be no such thing as a data breach. NDR offers a way for enterprises to eliminate network blind spots and stop threats in their tracks.
