What is Network Traffic Analysis (NTA)?

The Need for an NTA Solution

Corporate IT infrastructure is made up of a wide variety of different environments and endpoints, which increases the difficulty of monitoring and securing an organization’s IT architecture. However, all of these systems are connected over the network, which is also how threats enter an organization’s environment and move between systems. NTA solutions monitor network traffic for anomalies, which can tip an organization off to a cyberattack or other issues with its network infrastructure.

How Does NTA Enhance Your Security?

NTA provides organizations with the ability to more effectively analyze network traffic and identify anomalies that could point to cyberattacks or other potential issues. These capabilities provide numerous benefits to an organization, including the following:

• Network Visibility: Corporate networks are growing larger and more complex, making it difficult to maintain visibility. NTA solutions can help to enhance security by giving companies better visibility into their networks and the anomalous network activity that could indicate a potential attack.
• Threat Detection: Many stages of a cyberattack, including initial access, lateral movement, and command and control communications, occur over the network. NTA can help an organization to detect these activities, aiding in the detection and remediation of cyberattacks.
• Troubleshooting: Corporate IT systems may go down or suffer degraded performance due to cyberattacks or natural events. NTA solutions can help to identify if a system is down and provide context that can be valuable for diagnosing and correcting the issue.
• Investigation Support: NTA solutions collect network traffic data for analysis and can store this data for future use. If a security operations center (SOC) has identified a potential incident, then an NTA solution can be used to identify associated network traffic and analyze it, providing additional visibility into the malicious actions performed on the system.
• Threat Intelligence: After a threat has been identified, an NTA solution can extract unique features — such as IP addresses — that can be used to build indicators of compromise (IoCs). This information can be used to identify additional threats and prevent future attempted attacks.
• Policy Enforcement: Firewall rules, zero trust security policies, and similar security controls are designed to restrict the use of corporate IT systems to authorized activities. NTA can be used to identify policy violations and security gaps.
• Regulatory Compliance: Data protection regulations commonly mandate that an organization demonstrate that it protects regulated data against unauthorized access. NTA traffic logs can help to demonstrate that only authorized users have accessed restricted data and systems.