The number of SaaS applications and business services within organizations continues to grow at an unprecedented pace. According to Gartner, organizations maintain an average of over 125 different SaaS applications and store between 500K to 10M assets within these SaaS applications. Most of these assets are shared both internally and externally, which poses a significant risk should your data be exposed to threats anywhere on the attack surface. In fact, nearly half of all data breaches that occurred in 2020 can be traced back to SaaS applications.
The cybersecurity vulnerabilities, attack surface, and business risks for many organizations and governments are increasing due to many contributing factors. Among the top factors which have gained momentum over the past couple of years are:
1 – AI Transformation Driven Disruptions
Every three out of four organizations are executing on their digital and AI transformation strategies such as cloud migration, digitization, new service rollouts, AI/ML etc. However, the technology and security landscape is always evolving, which introduces new risks and expands the ever-changing threat landscape.
2 – Threats from Geo-Political Conflicts
The current global geo-political situation, tensions, and conflicts among different nation-
blocks have resulted in a significant increase in cyber incidents on government entities,
defense, public infrastructure, communications, and enterprise assets.
3 – Ransomeware Attacks
Attackers becoming more resourceful and persistent, and newer attack types are emerging
daily. Most of the newer types of attacks are now coming through the network. As recently as January 2023, the Royal Mail, the UK postal service, was targeted by hackers in a ransomware attack that impacted the systems responsible for tracking international mail. It took a painstaking long twenty days for the Royal Mail to fully restore international mail services.
Ransomware attacks and breaches have reached an all-time high, with the attack surface in 2022 and beyond becoming increasingly larger and sophisticated. The ability to detect cyber threats quickly, to have proactive security measures, and detect new, malicious threats, is more critical than ever.
This is the reason cPacket has joined forces with the industry’s leading Network Detection and Response companies to enable solutions that provide data intelligence, robust threat detection and fast forensic analysis. cPacket and its security partners together provide customers with greater network visibility and security across all their devices, endpoints, and systems. Network Detection and Response, more commonly known by the industry term NDR, works by ingesting and analyzing network packet data. The packet ingestion is our forte. Reliable delivery and trustworthiness of network packets are crucial to strengthen security posture. The more the data can be trusted, the more the results can be trusted. This, in turn, empowers SecOps team or MDR provider to detect and respond to security breaches before they become costly and chaotic.
A well-rounded NDR solution consists of mostly three layers:
- Network Intelligence and Data Delivery Layer: The threat detection and mitigation are only as good as the visibility and the quality of network data it is receiving to act upon. That is garbage in, and garbage out. cPacket plays this foundational role in the NDR solution through its cVu® series packet broker observability nodes (and cTap® series network TAPs). cPacket’s cVu physical or cVu-V virtual nodes acquire and process network data in a data center or multi-cloud environment in a lossless, real-time, and intelligent manner. This data is then fed into the threat detection layer from partners, effectively making cPacket the “N” (network) in the NDR solution.
- Threat Detection and Mitigation Layer: The “D” (detection) in the NDR solution is the layer/tool provided by NDR security partners, such as ExtraHop’s Reveal(x) or Corelight’s Zeek security monitoring platforms. These tools ingest the network data and, utilizing their intelligent algorithms, identify potential threats, thus preventing incidents and breaches from occurring.
- Forensics and Incident Response Layer: The “R” (response) in the NDR solution is the layer/tool that can either function independently by cPacket or alongside an incident response partner tool. This layer involves permanently storing packet data on disk drives or cloud storage, which can be retrieved and analyzed in the event of a security breach. Such forensic analysis is critical in containing the damage caused by the breach, responding promptly, identifying the culprit, and using the data as evidence for legal and compliance purposes. cPacket’s cStor® series packet capture and analysis observability nodes are designed to fulfill this role.
Customers are looking for a security expert that can help them get the most out of their security tools and provide the best threat protection across their environment. cPacket along with its ecosystem of NDR partner delivers the security outcomes and operational excellence that our customers deserve and expect. Learn more about the security benefits from implementing a leading NDR solution. When you are ready, contact our team at cPacket to learn more about our NDR solution or see it in action.
