7 Best Network Detection and Response Solutions in 2023

Network detection and response software is used to log business network activity for threats, notify the relevant users, and automate threat remediation. These tools monitor east-west traffic and compare them to baselines and trigger steps to investigate when they detect deviation from these baselines.

As much as organizations are heavily investing in preventing threat actors from accessing their networks, the rapid evolution of the threat landscape is heavily contributing to an increased number of attack incidences on organizations.

Attackers continue to find security gaps by hiding malicious activities within encrypted traffic that legacy network detection and response (NDR) solutions fail to see and detect. However, with the right NDR solutions, organizations can drastically improve their ability to detect and respond to cyber threats.

Also see: Top Enterprise Networking Companies

Best NDR Solutions

• Dartrace
• ExtraHop
• Vectra
• Cisco Secure Network Analytics
• Arista NDR
• Gigamon ThreatINSIGHT
• CrowdStrike Falcon Firewall Management
• Why Use NDR Solutions?
• How to Choose an NDR Solution
• NDR Comparison Chart

Also see: Best Network Management Solutions 

Darktrace

Darktrace is a leading cybersecurity company that delivers artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solutions to combat the world’s cyber disruption. It has helped secure thousands of users from complex cyberattacks such as ransomware, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud attacks.

The company uses proprietary self-learning AI to provide bespoke solutions to its users based on consistent visibility into the whole digital ecosystem of an organization. Darktrace serves businesses of all sizes across all industries and covers the cloud, email, applications, networks, endpoints, and operational technology.

Key Differentiators

• Cyber AI Loop: Darktrace uses a set of capabilities that collaborate autonomously to optimize an organization’s security posture via a continuous feedback loop. The system of constant feedback creates a cycle through which each capability hardens and strengthens the whole ecosystem of an organization.
• Endpoint Protection: Darktrace and its tools enable its customers to protect their workforces regardless of their location. It carries out an analysis of rich host-level data through Darktrace agents or EDR integrations to enhance threat protection across dynamic workforces.
• Zero Trust: Through an AI that validates policies and arrests the threats that evade these policies, Darktrace strengthens the zero-trust architecture of its users.
• Network Protection: Darktrace immediately shuts down network threats by learning the patterns of systems to expose unpredictable cyber threats across corporate networks, then takes the required action to minimize disruption.

ExtraHop

ExtraHop offers a dynamic cyber defense platform, ExtraHop Reveal(x), to detect and respond to cyber threats before they wreak havoc. ExtraHop Reveal(x) NDR automatically discovers and classifies each session, transaction, device, and asset of an enterprise at up to 100Gbps to decode tens of enterprise protocols and extract thousands of features to optimize the accuracy and precision and accuracy of ExtraHop’s ML capabilities.

The company also provides ExtraHop Reveal(x) 360 for unified threat intelligence across hybrid and multicloud environments.

Key Differentiators

• Automated Investigation: Reveal(x) provides context to detections from a whole transaction, with threat intelligence, asset criticality, and risk scores for more straightforward triage and response.
• Confident Response Orchestration: Reveal(x) handles detection and investigation and can be integrated with solutions like Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, and Phantom to help users automate remediation.
• Automated Inventory: With Reveal(x), users are guaranteed an ever-updated device inventory with no manual effort through the automated discovery and classification of everything that communicates on their networks.
• Advanced Machine Learning: ExtraHop Reveal(x)’s machine learning is powered by more than 5000 features to improve detection and response to threats.

Vectra

Vectra NDR is an advanced AI-driven attack defense for detecting and halting threats in enterprise networks without noise or the need for decryption. The NDR solution leverages Security AI-driven Attack Signal Intelligence to guarantee precise, clear, and contextualized early visibility to respond to unknown and surface threats, malicious activities, and attacks.

With Vectra, enterprises can observe, understand, and respond to threats and attacks with greater effectiveness to reduce the pressure on and time spent by security teams.

Key Differentiators

• Network Visibility: Vectra enables its users to see, analyze, and store network activity and expose secret malicious behavior without prior knowledge or pattern detection.
• Advanced Investigation: With Vectra, organizations can constantly derive knowledge from their evolving network infrastructure and gain valuable insights.
• AI-Driven Detection: The solution offers automated threat detection with advanced analytics, complex behavior analysis, deep learning, and insights into the methods of threats to best discern incidents from countless data points.
• AI-Driven Triage: Through a machine learning and AI approach, Vectra further analyzes active detections, their contexts, and common points between them to determine the urgency of each true positive detection without human intervention.

Cisco Secure Network Analytics

Cisco Secure Network Analytics offers network visibility to effectively detect and respond to threats in real time. It consistently analyzes network activity to develop a baseline of healthy network behavior. A combination of this baseline with non-signature-based advanced analytics and global threat intelligence empowers enterprises to achieve real-time identification and response to anomalies and threats.

Secure Network Analytics is capable of detecting threats, like command-and-control and distributed denial of service (DDoS), illegal crypto mining, and unknown malware among others, with great speed and confidence.

Key Differentiators

• Real-Time Detection: Secure Network Analysis leverages broad high-fidelity behavioral threat detection functionality to instantly improve insider and unknown threat detection, encrypted malware detection, policy violations, and incident response and forensics.
• Encrypted Traffic Analysis: Since cyber criminals are more and more adept at concealing malware and avoiding detection, Cisco is capable of analyzing encrypted traffic without any decryption to not only handle threats in encrypted traffic but also ensure cryptographic compliance.
• Remote Worker Monitoring: Users are empowered to capture a vast scope of supplementary granular, endpoint-specific user and device contexts to deliver complete and consistent visibility into the activity of remote worker endpoints.

Arista NDR

Arista NDR delivers a unified platform that captures, processes, and stores vast real-time network data using specialized AI-driven security detection and response workflows. It provides organizations with a unified view of their security postures across hybrid environments.

Arista implements zero-trust networking principles to assist its customers to create a robust cybersecurity program upon the pillars of visibility, continuous diagnostics, and enforcement. The NDR platform offers continuous diagnostics for the whole enterprise threat landscape, processes uncountable data points, detects irregularities, and responds where necessary, all in seconds.

Key Differentiators

• EntityIQ: Through EntityIQ, Arista uses a security knowledge graph to identify and profile all applications, devices, and users on enterprise networks. It enables users to discover, characterize, and trust relationships and group similar entities. They can also combine network data with business and behavioral data to improve the efficiency of threat response.
• AVA AI: AVA AI is a privacy-aware decision support system that delivers end-to-end situations to SOC teams instead of a multitude of meaningless alerts.
• Adversarial Modeling: Arista utilizes a building block approach to express even the most composite tactics, procedures, and techniques.

Gigamon ThreatINSIGHT

Gigamon ThreatINSIGHT Guided-SaaS NDR provides security teams with the tools and visibility into historical network data to enable them to expose suspicious activity while bettering incident response functionality, eradicating tool maintenance distractions, and relieving burnout experienced by analysts.

Gigamon combines Gigamon Applied Threat Research (ATR) and security analysts and incident responders from the Gigamon Technical Success Management (TSM) to make sure ThreatINSIGHT has the maximum impact against threats.

Key Differentiators

• High-Fidelity Adversary Detections: ThreatINSIGHT combines behavioral analysis, machine learning, and crowdsourced threat intelligence to deliver high-fidelity adversary detections.
• Guided Playbooks: Security operations center teams are empowered to examine attackers based on real-world patterns using guided playbooks for rapid response and hunting.
• Zero Detection Tuning: Gigamon carries out constant detection tuning and quality assurance of all machine learning, behavioral analysis, and threat intelligence detection engines.

CrowdStrike Falcon Firewall Management

CrowdStrike is a global cybersecurity provider with an aim of redefining security for the cloud era via an endpoint protection platform to protect users from breaches. It delivers CrowdStrike Falcon Firewall Management, which uses a lightweight agent architecture to leverage cloud-scale AI and provide real-time visibility and protection to enterprises.

CrowdStrike Falcon Firewall Management specifically does away with the complexities of native firewalls by simplifying the ability to manage and enforce policies through a straightforward centralized approach. It provides an easy-to-understand activity view to deliver instant visibility to enterprises, enabling them to monitor and troubleshoot critical rules to enhance protection and provide direction.

Key Differentiators

• Simple Firewall Management: The product enables users to efficiently create, enforce, and maintain firewall policies and rules. Users can use monitor mode to test the whole policy before deployment to understand what would have been allowed or blocked.
• Better Protection: Falcon Firewall Management gives users the ability to automatically identify and see specific activities, possible threats, and network irregularities.
• Reduced Complexity: The lightweight Falcon agent, management console, and cloud-native architecture offer users simplified operations while deployment takes minutes without needing fine-tuning or reboots, resulting in streamlined workflows and increased visibility.
• Logging, Troubleshooting, and Compliance: Granular control and visibility provide users with quick troubleshooting. They can use role-based access control to make sure only the correct admins have access to firewall rules.

Why Use NDR Solutions?

As the threat landscape continues to evolve, the pitfalls of traditional cybersecurity tools continue to become more glaring. The effectiveness of signature-based tools like intrusion detection systems continues to wane, as malware is not that straightforward today, and it is more difficult to stop threats at the network perimeter.

With NDR solutions, users get rapid investigation, intelligent response, rapid investigation and enhanced threat protection across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. What this offers enterprises is lower exposure to risk associated with the financial and reputation impact of data breaches and ransomware.

NDR solutions also enable organizations to empower security operations center (SOC) teams with enhanced threat detection and response while also closing their compliance gaps. In addition, these solutions offer greater IT efficiency with a single workflow for threat detection, response, and forensics.

With the right NDR solutions, enterprises save money since through a single tool, they can enjoy detection and response functionality across their environments. The correct solutions also support the digital transformation initiatives of an organization.

Also see: Best IoT Platforms for Device Management

How to Choose an NDR Solution

There are various considerations to make before selecting an NDR solution for your enterprise. Here are some of the most important ones:

• Vastness and Type of Rich Data Sources: Buyers should find out whether the prospective solution can collect a wide scope and type of rich data sources. They should consider what types of data are included and excluded and whether the solution offers metadata enrichment.
• Data Science and Analytics: It is crucial to determine whether the solution leverages machine learning (ML) and modern data science and analytics to correlate network data and identify and handle threats.
• Scope of Deep Threat Protection Use Cases: Does the prospective solution cover use cases like encrypted traffic analysis and long-term behavioral analysis? How many stand-alone threat protection use cases does the solution support?
• Impact on SOC Teams: Before choosing a solution, it is important to find out whether a prospective NDR solution improves the ability of SOC teams to respond to and remediate threats.

NDR Comparison Chart