In today's rapidly evolving threat landscape, network detection and response (NDR) solutions play a critical role in identifying and mitigating cyber threats. However, not all NDR platforms deliver the same level of visibility, context, and value. As renewal time approaches for your current NDR solution, it's the perfect opportunity to evaluate whether you're getting the protection your organization deserves.
Before signing that renewal contract, ask yourself these five essential questions:
1. Are you receiving rich, actionable evidence with your alerts?
When an alert fires, your team needs comprehensive evidence to understand what triggered it and how to respond effectively. Many NDR solutions operate as "black boxes," providing alerts without sufficient supporting context.
What to look for: A solution like Clear NDR from Stamus Networks that not only triggers alerts but provides detailed protocol transactions, verbose flow records, and automatically correlates them with security events. Your NDR should maintain extensive metadata profiles for every host and endpoint, both inside and outside your network, giving defenders complete visibility into what triggered an event with detailed attack timelines.
2. How transparent are your detection methods?
Sophisticated security teams need to understand exactly how detection works—not just trust that it does.
What to look for: Clear NDR exposes all the details for its detection algorithms, enabling defenders to understand precisely what triggered an event. This transparency is critical for sophisticated SOC teams who need to validate alerts and build institutional knowledge, rather than relying on unexplained AI decisions that leave them piecing together what happened.
3. Can you extend your NDR with custom detections?
No single vendor can anticipate every threat scenario unique to your environment. The ability to customize and extend your NDR's detection capabilities is essential.
What to look for: A solution that allows you to augment built-in detections with third-party threat intelligence and develop your own custom detections, whether through signatures or detection-as-code. Clear NDR provides this flexibility, allowing security teams to tailor the platform to their specific needs and seamlessly integrate with existing security stacks.
4. Does your NDR deliver immediate value, or does it require extensive training?
Many NDR solutions rely heavily on behavioral anomaly detection that requires weeks or months of baseline learning before becoming effective.
What to look for: Multi-layered threat detection approaches that deliver value from day one. Clear NDR combines artificial intelligence and machine learning with advanced heuristics, traditional signatures, and purpose-built detection methods for specific threats (like homoglyphs and C2 beacons). This layered approach means you don't have to wait for lengthy training periods to get protection.
5. Has your renewal price unexpectedly increased due to complex licensing models?
Many vendors implement complex licensing models with variable costs based on the number of users, endpoints, or IP addresses discovered on your network.
What to look for: Transparent, predictable pricing like Clear NDR's straightforward model based simply on monitored line rate (e.g., 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 100 Gbps). With no additional charges for API access, integrations, number of users, or endpoints, you won't face surprise cost increases at renewal time based on your growing network.
We have seen a number of customers who have made the switch from Darktrace to Clear NDR
If you would like to see how Clear NDR stacks up against another solution - from Darktrace - which we believe is at the opposite end of the transparency spectrum, we created a technical brief document with a side-by-side comparison of Clear NDR and the Darktrace NDR.
Click the button below to access this document.
Conclusion
As cyber threats continue to evolve in sophistication, your NDR solution should evolve with them. If your current solution doesn't provide the rich data, transparency, extensibility, immediate value, and straightforward pricing that today's security teams require, it may be time to consider alternatives.
Stamus Networks' Clear NDR has been chosen by sophisticated security teams across 15 countries, often winning head-to-head comparisons against more well-known competitors. Its dedicated focus on NDR innovation—rather than diluting resources across multiple product lines—ensures you're getting best-of-breed network detection and response capabilities without compromise.
Before automatically renewing your current NDR contract, consider whether it's truly delivering the protection and value your organization deserves. Your security posture—and budget—will thank you.
About Stamus Networks: Stamus Networks offers Clear NDR, a multi-layered network detection and response solution that provides immediate value, transparent detections, and rich supporting evidence.
Want to see if Clear NDR is right for your security team? Request a demo at https://www.stamus-networks.com/demo or request custom pricing using our quote generator at https://www.stamus-networks.com/pricing-quote-generator
