The organization lacked visibility into port devices. Many mission-critical assets were unable to support endpoint agents, leaving the team blind to device-to-device communication. This lack of east-west visibility meant that lateral movement and network-based threats could propagate undetected across the infrastructure.

The urgency for a modern NDR solution peaked in 2024 when a competitor's port was hit with ransomware, resulting in a two-week shutdown. This wake-up call proved that the organization's existing security posture could not ensure the continuous operation of its global shipping sites.

The network team lacked in-depth visibility into how port devices connected back to the central datacenter. Without high-fidelity network records or packet capture, troubleshooting performance and security issues remained a manual, time-consuming process. Additionally, a legacy NDR competitor failed to provide confident integration. Without a unified view or streamlined integration with key applications like CrowdStrike, the organization faced significant operational burdens correlating data from disparate systems.

The organization secured the required forensic depth and network control when it deployed ExtraHop. The platform 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. High-fidelity, low-noise detections allowed analysts to move focus from false positives to highly reliable network activity. This signals true post-compromise threats and endpoint detection and response (EDR) evasion tactics.

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

ExtraHop fundamentally simplified incident response workflows. It established itself as the definitive source of network truth. The platform automatically feeds 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. This created one unified, integrated solution for comprehensive network security and observability.

The organization mitigated major risk by gaining deep fluency. Parsing over 90+ protocols 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.