The data center relied heavily on applications published via F5 LTM/ASM. The massive volume of encrypted SSL/TLS traffic created critical blind spots, leaving analysts unable to inspect traffic for hidden post-compromise behaviors.

The team required a single solution that natively delivered both signature-based intrusion detection (IDS) and behavior-based network detection and response (NDR). Deploying separate products threatened to introduce tool sprawl and complex operational workflows.

The new platform had to align tightly with existing investments, integrating seamlessly with Gigamon packet brokers, Splunk SIEM, and Palo Alto Networks SOAR without increasing configuration overhead or breaking traffic workflows.

Alternative NDR tools selected for evaluation presented a financial bottleneck by forcing all network records into Splunk SIEM. This architecture would trigger skyrocketing data ingestion fees and unsustainably inflate the total cost of ownership.

The organization secured the required forensic depth and network control when it deployed ExtraHop, which analyzes 100 Gbps of east-west traffic and uses high-speed decryption to immediately find threats previously hidden within encrypted flows.

The cloud-scale machine learning built into the ExtraHop platform lifted the SOC's operational burden because it provided high-fidelity, low-noise detections. This shift allowed analysts to move focus from low-value false positives to highly reliable network activity, signaling true post-compromise threats and endpoint detection and response (EDR) evasion tactics.

The security team achieved comprehensive insight by using identity-based investigation, which links malicious network activity directly to user and service accounts, finally enabling the detection of all missed AD and lateral movement attacks.

ExtraHop fundamentally simplified incident response workflows because it established itself as the definitive source of network truth, automatically feeding high-value contextual data to the customer’s existing SIEM and EDR platforms.

The organization gained efficiency and reduced complexity by consolidating NDR, NPM, and IDS capabilities into one unified, integrated solution for comprehensive network security and observability.

The organization mitigated major risk by gaining deep fluency (parsing over 90 protocols) that allowed for accurate decoding of all traffic, including sensitive database communications, without introducing performance risk. This was critical for detecting hidden AD attacks and lateral movement.