The bank lacked east-west visibility into real-time network threats. It relied on a legacy approach that required manual data collection only after issues were detected. This delay left the bank vulnerable to network-based ransomware, data exfiltration, and lateral movement across its critical data center services.

The security team had no insight into insecure protocols or the specific servers using them. There was no centralized system to track expiring certificates. These architectural gaps hid potential vulnerabilities that could be exploited to compromise the branch and data center network.

Investigating threats was a slow process involving complex data collection across various networks and virtualization tools. These fragmented workflows hindered coordination between security and operations teams. The bank needed a unified platform to correlate network anomalies and reduce the labor costs associated with manual troubleshooting.

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

The bank 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.