Discover the Top 5 XDR Use Cases for Today’s Cyber Threat Landscape
See how Fidelis NDR enhances network security with proactive defense capabilities, offering
As cyberattacks become more complex, network detection and response solutions have become essential for modern organizations.
These are more than firewalls and antivirus software; instead, they make use of advanced analytics, machine learning, and behavioral modeling to detect and neutralize threats in real time.
This blog breaks down NDR’s main features, critical capabilities that will be deal-makers, and common pitfalls to be avoided during product evaluation – prioritizing what actually matters for having robust network security.
Modern signature-based detection methods cannot match the stealthy nature of traditional, sophisticated attacks. Too often, security teams are overwhelmed by false positives and subtle threats that remain undetected.
This feature utilizes supervised and unsupervised machine learning to create a baseline of normal network behavior and automatically identifies anomalies-like rare data transfers, unusual device communications, or spikes in encrypted traffic.
This sophisticated detection cuts down on false positives by eliminating benign anomalies and focusing on actual threats, including zero-day attacks and APTs.
Example: Your network is slowly transferring data in large amounts late at night, an activity that deviates from the norm. The system detects this anomaly and sends an alert to your team before any critical data is compromised.
Many security tools only monitor traffic entering or leaving your network, leaving internal (east/west) movements unobserved. This creates dangerous blind spots, especially in complex hybrid environments.
This feature analyzes flow data (e.g., NetFlow, IPFIX) from all network devices and monitors encrypted traffic using metadata analysis and session behavior profiling. It supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments seamlessly.
With complete visibility, your organization can track every network communication and detect lateral movements, ensuring no segment of your network is left unmonitored.
For Example: An attacker gains access through a compromised device and starts moving laterally across your network. The system captures this movement through detailed flow data analysis, alerting you to the suspicious behavior.
Detecting a threat is only half the battle—manual response times can delay containment, allowing attackers to spread within your network.
This feature integrates automated playbooks designed to quarantine infected devices, block malicious IPs, and isolate compromised network segments. It also integrates with SIEM, SOAR, or EDR tools and includes threat-hunting capabilities that let analysts inspect raw packet data (PCAP) for validation.
Automation streamlines your response process, reducing the window of opportunity for attackers and easing the burden on your security team.
For Example:
When a threat is detected, an automated playbook can immediately isolate the affected device and notify your security operations center. Meanwhile, threat-hunting tools provide detailed context for further investigation.
Expensive hardware probes and extensive storage requirements for full packet captures can quickly drive up costs and complicate scaling.
Having this feature uses flow-based analysis instead of full packet capture, offers cloud-native deployment for elastic scalability, and is designed to integrate with existing tools like VMware and Kubernetes.
This approach reduces both complexity and operational costs while ensuring that your network monitoring can grow seamlessly with your business.
For Example: As your organization expands, the system scales in the cloud without needing additional costly hardware investments, allowing you to maintain high performance without budget overruns.
Post-incident investigations typically lack the context required to fully understand attack vectors, making it difficult to fortify defenses for future incidents.
Having built-in network forensics that trace the origins of attacks and affected systems, is aligned with frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK, and supports long-term metadata retention for historical analysis.
These capabilities give you very good insight into the full scope of an attack, making it possible to analyze with details and improve accordingly on your security strategies.
For instance, after the breach, forensic tools allow your team to rebuild a timeline for the attack, point out vulnerabilities, and map out the tactics of the adversary, giving you very clear paths for remediation.
Generic alerts without context lead to alert fatigue and slow down incident triage, making it challenging for teams to prioritize the most critical threats.
This feature should deliver real-time alerts in context and include information about the user, device, and application along with risk scores, and visualized attack timelines.
It empowers your team to focus on the highest-risk incidents through actionable, prioritized information, and makes good decisions fast.
For instance, instead of a general alert, your security operations center receives a detailed notification that highlights an anomaly involving a specific device, accompanied by a risk score and timeline, which allows for immediate, targeted action.
Must Read: Leveraging NDR for Risk-Based Alerting
Standalone security solutions can operate in silos, leading to fragmented visibility and slower response times across disparate systems.
For Example: When an incident occurs, our integrated system correlates data from multiple sources—such as endpoint alerts and firewall logs—to provide a comprehensive view, ensuring no detail is overlooked.
To fully leverage the capabilities of your NDR platform and ensure you’re getting the best return on your cybersecurity investment, consider these strategies:
Augment your NDR solution with real-time, external threat intelligence feeds. This provides an extra layer of context, allowing your system to detect emerging risks like zero-day exploits and advanced persistent threats that might not yet be recognized by standard signatures or behavioral baselines.
The performance of AI and machine learning models improves with continuous learning. Regularly refining these models with environment-specific data and feedback from your security incidents will reduce false positives and sharpen detection accuracy.
Combine your NDR solution with robust network segmentation to isolate critical assets. Segmentation limits the lateral movement of threats and reduces the overall attack surface.
Integrate your NDR platform with SIEM, EDR, and other security solutions to create a cohesive, centralized view of your network’s security posture. Data correlation across these tools enhances situational awareness and accelerates incident response.
Even the best technology is only as effective as the people who use it. Invest in training your security staff on the nuances of your NDR solution, including its threat-hunting tools, forensic capabilities, and automated response mechanisms.
Before making your decision, consider these critical points to ensure your chosen NDR solution meets all your operational and security needs:
Selection of the best-fit NDR is a question of balancing between rich detection capabilities and operational simplicity alongside cost effectiveness. By putting together features like ML, Encrypted Traffic Analysis and Hybrid Cloud, organizations stay well ahead of continually evolving threats yet avoid unwanted complexities.
Ready to see how Fidelis Network stacks up? Schedule a demo to experience our platform in action.
An NDR solution continuously monitors network traffic using advanced analytics and machine learning to detect threats in real time.
It learns normal network behavior and flags anomalies like unusual data transfers or communications, helping to spot zero-day and insider attacks.
It seamlessly works with SIEM, EDR/XDR, firewalls, and NAC systems, providing a unified view for faster incident response.
See Fidelis in action. Learn how our fast and scalable platforms provide full visibility, deep insights, and rapid response to help security teams across the World protect, detect, respond, and neutralize advanced cyber adversaries.