In today's complex threat landscape, cybersecurity teams face an overwhelming challenge: detecting sophisticated attacks while avoiding alert fatigue. Network Detection and Response (NDR) solutions have emerged as critical components of the modern security stack, providing visibility into threats that might bypass traditional defenses. However, not all NDR solutions are created equal, and one crucial differentiator is increasingly separating leading solutions from the rest: transparency.
Many of today's most prominent NDR vendors heavily market their artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. These vendors position their proprietary algorithms as nearly magical solutions that can automatically detect any threat. While these technologies certainly have their place in modern security, they've also created a significant problem: the black box effect.
A black box solution provides alerts without adequate explanation or evidence. It essentially asks security teams to trust that something is wrong without showing them why. When your NDR tells you something is wrong, your natural next questions are “why?” and “what should I do next?” The black box approach creates several critical challenges:
The black box approach to security might seem attractive on the surface. After all, if the AI can handle everything, why would you need to understand the details? However, this thinking ignores the realities of security operations and incident response.
Consider this scenario: It's 2 AM, and your NDR solution alerts to potential data exfiltration. The alert provides a confidence score of 85% but offers little explanation beyond that. As the on-call analyst, you're left with difficult questions:
Without transparency, each of these questions becomes exponentially more difficult to answer. The reality is that black box solutions don't eliminate work—they shift it to overworked security analysts who must piece together what happened without adequate context.
Truly effective NDR solutions build transparency into their core design. This transparency manifests in four critical ways:
Security teams should understand exactly how detections work. This includes:
When teams understand detection logic, they can better tune their security tools, reducing false positives while ensuring genuine threats don't slip through the cracks.
When an alert triggers, analysts need more than just a notification—they need evidence. Transparent NDR solutions provide:
This evidence package transforms vague alerts into actionable intelligence, dramatically reducing investigation time.
Beyond raw data, analysts need context. Transparent solutions provide:
This context helps analysts quickly determine the appropriate response level and investigate efficiently.
No vendor can anticipate every organization's unique security needs. Transparent solutions allow teams to:
This flexibility ensures the solution evolves with both the threat landscape and organizational needs.
A global financial institution recently shared their experience transitioning from a black box NDR solution to a transparent alternative. Their security operations center (SOC) had been struggling with alert overload and increasing mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) despite significant investment in their previous solution.
After deploying a transparent NDR platform, they experienced:
The SOC manager attributed these improvements directly to transparency: "When my team can see exactly why an alert triggered and has immediate access to all the supporting evidence, they can make informed decisions quickly. We're no longer wasting time trying to figure out what our security tools are trying to tell us."
Security leaders face a fundamental choice in their NDR strategy: opt for black box solutions that promise automated magic but deliver investigative headaches, or choose transparent platforms that provide the context and evidence needed for effective security operations.
As threats grow more sophisticated, the limitations of black box security become increasingly problematic. Attackers are developing techniques specifically designed to evade machine learning systems, and without transparency, security teams may never understand how these evasions succeed.
The next generation of NDR solutions will not abandon advanced analytics and machine learning—these technologies remain valuable. However, leading solutions will wrap these capabilities in layers of transparency that empower rather than mystify security teams.
The most effective security teams demand solutions that:
As the industry matures, transparency will not remain merely an advantage—it will become an expectation. Security teams will increasingly reject solutions that cannot or will not explain their detections, recognizing that in security, understanding "why" is often as important as knowing "what."
As you evaluate your current or future NDR solution, ask yourself:
If you're answering "no" to one or more of these questions, you may be operating with a black box solution that's costing your team precious time and potentially missing critical threats.
The most sophisticated security teams are moving beyond black box security, embracing solutions that combine advanced detection capabilities with the transparency needed for effective operations. In today's threat landscape, you shouldn't have to choose between powerful detection and clear explanation—demand both from your security vendors.
If your NDR solution can't clearly show you what it found and why it matters, it's not truly transparent—regardless of what the marketing materials claim.
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.
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
Request custom pricing using our quote generator at https://www.stamus-networks.com/pricing-quote-generator