What is the Role of NDR?

Network detection and response (NDR) is beginning to play a larger role in many organizations’ security strategies. This is because NDR helps fill in the gaps left by other popular security solutions, such as endpoint detection and response (EDR), while simultaneously providing other added benefits. Many organizations look to research reports from Garter - such as the "2024 Market Guide for Network Detection and Response" - before making buying decisions, but unfortunately Gartner has not released a network detection and response magic quadrant. As a result, organizations must find alternative means of understanding and evaluating their NDR choice. With that in mind, let’s explore the role of NDR in your security strategy and identify what you should look for when evaluating NDR solutions.

What is the role of NDR in your security strategy?

NDR security tools serve the same goals as many other threat detection and response systems like EDR or extended detection and response (XDR). The main differences in these systems are in how they detect threats and what actions they can perform once a threat is detected. There are four main use cases for NDR security tools:

1. Automated Threat Detection - Advanced algorithms and machine learning automatically identify potential threats within network traffic. Continuous monitoring and network data analysis enable NDR solutions to detect anomalous behaviors, malicious patterns, and IOCs in near real-time. This enables security teams to perform the following use-case – incident response.
2. Incident Response - By capturing detailed network activity logs and traffic data, NDR empowers security teams to reconstruct the sequence of events, investigate the root cause, and understand the extent of the breach. This enhanced visibility allows for faster response times, enabling organizations to contain and mitigate the impact of security incidents efficiently.
3. Proactive Threat Hunting - Security analysts can use advanced search capabilities, behavioral analytics, and threat intelligence to actively explore network data, identify hidden threats, and uncover emerging attack patterns. Proactive threat hunting helps organizations stay ahead of threat actors, detecting and neutralizing threats before they cause harm.
4. Remediation - Once a threat is identified, an NDR system can automatically trigger a response action through integrations with other systems like EDR to block suspicious IP addresses, isolate compromised end-user devices, or implement access control policies. These actions help contain the threat, prevent lateral movement, and minimize the impact of a security incident.

For organizations considering NDR, understanding how these four NDR use cases fit into your cybersecurity strategy is vital when looking at NDR options. If a prospective NDR solution cannot fulfill these basic functions, you are better off looking for an NDR from a different vendor.

What are the benefits of NDR?

While each NDR software will provide different benefits depending on its unique functions, there are some more general benefits that many organizations enjoy once deploying NDR. Consider the following NDR outcomes and whether or not they apply to your organization when evaluating NDR solutions:

NDR Fills Gaps Left by EDR and Similar Tools:

EDR systems require installing an agent on every device, creating coverage gaps in certain environments like those with IoT devices, many medical facilities, or Bring-Your-Own-Device policies. NDR — operating without agents — provides real-time monitoring for optimal visibility in any environment.
NDR Secures Cloud and Hybrid Environments:

As cloud and hybrid setups become more common, the need for security systems that can monitor these environments is increasing. NDR utilizes network telemetry data — a valuable source for monitoring, analysis, threat detection, and investigation — to monitor cloud assets that use the network for communication.
NDR Benefits Both Security and IT Teams:

Beyond its security advantages, NDR is beneficial for IT teams. It offers heightened visibility into the network, assisting in diagnosing network issues and optimizing overall network performance.
NDR Empowers Zero-Trust Security:

The widely adopted zero-trust security model requires continuous verification of users, devices, and applications on the network. Achieving this verification is challenging without comprehensive visibility into the network, a task easily accomplished with NDR.

Why is NDR so important?

NDR is so important because it fills in gaps in visibility and detection and other systems often miss. For example, an organization using EDR might have great visibility into individual devices, but they have no coverage of their network and what might be accessed by their employees’ personal devices using the network. Additionally, NDR is adept at detecting anomalies using network traffic. These types of weak attack signals are often overlooked by popular traditional network security measures such as intrusion detection systems (IDS).

In their 2022 Market Guide for NDR, Garter says this:

“Security and risk management leaders should prioritize NDR as complementary to other detection tools, focusing on low false positive rates and detection of anomalies that other controls don’t cover.”

NDR is just a piece of the threat detection puzzle, but it is a very important piece. If your organization is evaluating NDR solutions, make sure to consider whether the NDR is redundant or complimentary to your existing tools.

What is an example of an NDR?

An example of an NDR solution that is complimentary of other cybersecurity tools is the Stamus Security Platform (SSP), a broad-spectrum, open network-based threat detection and response (NDR) system that delivers actionable network visibility and threat detection with:

Greater visibility & evidence
More complete detection
Response-ready notifications
Extensible threat intelligence
Straightforward integrations
Immediate results

SSP is the world’s most advanced Suricata-based network detection and response (NDR) system, combining the very best of machine learning, signature-based, IoC matching, and algorithmic threat detection into a single platform that identifies both known and unknown threats lurking on your network.

Is Stamus Security Platform right for your organization?

We believe that there are six key requirements a modern and mature NDR must fulfill to bring value to an organization’s cybersecurity strategy. An NDR must provide:

1. Sophisticated detection
2. Transparent, explainable results with evidence
3. High-fidelity response triggers
4. Guided threat hunting
5. Openness and extensibility
6. Complete data sovereignty

If your organization is evaluating NDR solutions, you should look to these requirements as a basic guideline for what to expect from an effective NDR. The Stamus Security Platform satisfies all six of these requirements and packages them into a single, highly effective network-based threat detection and response system. To learn more about NDR, what you should consider when evaluating prospective NDR solutions, and how NDR can complement your existing cybersecurity tools, we recommend these resources:

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