Rise Above the Noise in Enterprise Security

The tech industry is a hype machine. It's not just around smart devices and virtual reality glasses and self-driving cars, it's enterprise technology too. In fact, we B2B tech vendors are the worst offenders. And now, we've all blindly latched onto the next hot buzz phrase, Artificial Intelligence or AI.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the security industry. AI is the buzzword du jour. It papers the walls of RSA and Black Hat, and it pervades the marketing collateral of the 2,000 plus vendors vying for attention from security buyers. It manifests in the form of superheroes and robots and DNA sequences, a marketing Frankenstein's monster cobbled together from carbon lifeforms and silicon chips.

So how do you cut through the noise created by all of this hype when you know your company has amazing tech that can truly help customers? How do you fight the urge - and stakeholder pressure - to get on the hype train? How do you get customers and partners to focus on machine learning outcomes that are nothing artificial, only intelligent? Those were the questions my team and I had to solve for when ExtraHop decided to break into the security space with the launch of our Reveal(x) product. Our conclusion: it starts with strong product and value-centric messaging, but it must end with a commitment to the brand.

Over the course of my career I've had the privilege of leading a number of brand launches and rebrand efforts. But ExtraHop presented a unique and fascinating challenge. First, we were positioning a company with 10 years of history in IT operations as a security player in a notoriously noisy market. Second, ExtraHop is not your average tech company in that it's practically allergic to hyperbole.

Ask ExtraHop's founders what the most central value of the organization is, and they'll tell you: "We do what we say we do." That guiding philosophy has earned the company hundreds of loyal enterprise customers, but in an industry that gravitates toward the brash and disruptive, it doesn't always garner a lot of attention.

Rather than fight that organizational identity, we decided to embrace it, harnessing authenticity – that under-promise, over-deliver mentality – to create brand identity and drive awareness.

And so "Rise Above the Noise" was born.

"Rise Above the Noise" is a statement of opportunity. It's a challenge. It's a call to action and a promise that something better is within reach.

For our enterprise customers who struggle daily with thousands of alerts, organizational silos, and runaway technology, rising above the noise means having the ability to focus on broad missions and strategic outcomes. It means breaking free from reactive decision-making and narrow mandates.

It means something for ExtraHop, too. When we entered the security market, we knew that to succeed, we had to rise above the noise of the 2,000 other security vendors already competing for mindshare and market share. Doing that meant presenting a new vision of what security could be for an organization: security that doesn't come at the cost of uptime or modernization, that doesn't require the most sophisticated threat hunters to thwart attacks.

It also means something for the security industry as a whole. In a market that has overused and misused words like AI to the point that they've lost real meaning, it's time to pump the brakes and have a real conversation about what a truly modern security operations center should be. The truth – as many, many companies have learned the hard way – is that there is no silver bullet that will stop every threat.

"Rise Above the Noise" is not only a tagline, it's a call for authenticity, for bold innovation instead of brash over-promises. We invite the security industry to come along for the ride.