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How A Cloud-Native Approach Enables Frictionless, Scalable Security

ExtraHop

The public cloud isn’t just transforming the way you do business. It’s also changing the way security vendors market their products, with several claiming to offer “cloud-native” solutions. 

But cloud-native should be more than a marketing play. In order for these solutions to provide value instead of add friction, it needs to be a mindset. 

Why Cloud-Native Matters

Developers already have a cloud-native mindset, and it’s empowered them to accelerate frictionless development cycles and transform the nature of business operations. But for security teams, adopting a cloud-native approach has been more complicated, primarily because many of the tools they use weren’t designed for the speed and dynamism of the cloud. 

According to EMA research, 91% of enterprises have concerns about lost visibility in the cloud, and those concerns often slow digital transformation or stop it altogether. 

A structure known as the SOC Visibility Triad has emerged to help security leaders address those concerns. Foundational to the triad is visibility into network traffic through the fast-growing category of network detection and response (NDR), which compliments perimeter defenses and threat intelligence by—in theory—giving organizations complete visibility into hybrid and multicloud environments in a single product. 

NDR shows enormous promise, but it can be wasted by products that are simply retrofitted in an attempt to deliver the same level of visibility and control in the cloud as on-premises. In order to fulfill the category’s potential and actually eliminate concerns about visibility in the cloud, NDR solutions must be cloud-native as well. 

That means they must meet three essential criteria: they must be cloud-delivered, cloud-agnostic, and able to provide cloud intelligence at scale.

Cloud-Delivered

If a vendor can’t provide a full suite of NDR capabilities delivered as a service, they don’t have a cloud-native solution. Delivering NDR as a service eliminates friction and reduces the total cost of ownership, as well as provides a faster time to value—all aspects of the agility DevOps already benefits from in the cloud.

Cloud-native NDR products also need to be able to conduct machine learning (ML) in the cloud in order to provide scalable, low-impact threat detection and response across environments spanning from the data center to multicloud deployments. 

Cloud-Agnostic

Every CSP wants to be the only cloud provider businesses use, but the reality is that 98% of companies expect to use multiple hybrid clouds. The reasons why vary. Some want to take advantage of what each CSP does best, while others view multicloud as the best way to increase their options and negotiating power while reducing their exposure rate for breaches.  

If the CSP an organization uses has a major impact on how much visibility an NDR solution delivers, that solution cannot scale with the business. Cloud-native solutions should assume multicloud as the default, and provide native integrations with the major providers including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. 

Cloud Intelligence  

The ability to easily scale is central to the promise of cloud computing, and to truly provide cloud intelligence, NDR must offer 360-degree visibility and situational awareness that delivers immediate value and continuous protection across the entire attack surface.

The promise of the cloud can be summed up in one word: frictionless. It’s designed to simplify delivery, scale, and management to drive innovation. Now, it’s time to make the cloud a force-multiplier for security. 

Cloud-Native NDR Today

ExtraHop offers a suite of cloud-native solutions backed by cloud-scale ML. With near-limitless scale and agility for security and IT teams, we help enterprises like The Home Depot and Credit Suisse secure their complex environments by detecting threats up to 95 percent faster and speeding response by 60 percent. 

Watch this AWS re:Invent 2019 session with Dan McDaniel, Chief Architect and ISO at Wizards of the Coast, to learn how his organization uses cloud-native NDR from ExtraHop to secure and scale their business in the cloud:

Learn more about cloud-native network detection and response