What Are Cloud-Native Security Tools?

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. It needs to be a mindset, especially for vendors promising cloud-native network detection and response (NDR) solutions.

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 SecOps, 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.

NDR holds tremendous potential, 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. NDR should be able to complete the SOC Visibility Triad with one product across hybrid and multicloud deployments to address those security pain points.

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.

The best way to eliminate those concerns is by leveraging a cloud-native solution. But to be truly cloud-native, NDR must meet three essential criteria: it must be cloud-delivered, cloud-agnostic, and able to provide cloud intelligence at scale.

Let's double-click on those capabilities.

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.

Cloud-native NDR products need to be able to conduct cloud-scale machine learning (ML) for threat detection and response across environments spanning from the data center to multicloud deployments.

By delivering NDR as a service, ExtraHop eliminates several layers of friction while reducing the total cost of ownership and providing faster time to value. Because we manage our SaaS solution, you don't need to worry about updates and maintenance in order to stay ahead of threats.

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.

We engineered our cloud-native solutions with multicloud security in mind. Native integrations with AWS Traffic Mirroring, GCP Packet Mirroring, and the announced Azure vTAP provide agentless visibility, threat detection, and response capabilities across multiple environments from a single user interface.

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.

We've been harnessing the scale of the cloud to amplify intelligence since we first started to build out our ML more than six years ago because we knew that performing ML on-box limited its potential due to compute resource constraints.

By performing ML in the cloud, we have the scale and agility to analyze 4-plus petabytes of anonymized threat telemetry collected from more than 15 million devices and workloads worldwide. Our advanced machine learning transforms this vast data set into the critical situational intelligence our customers need to stay ahead of emerging threats.

Tying It All Together

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.

To learn more about how ExtraHop can help you reach that goal, visit our cloud-native security page.