In Security, Integrity Matters

Since I joined ExtraHop a little over four years ago, much has changed. We've grown as a company and expanded our operations around the world. We've continued to innovate, adding new capabilities to our platform, and new services to help our customers combat the increasingly advanced threat landscape. Our brand has evolved as well as we've helped to establish and lead the emerging network detection and response (NDR) category—according to Gartner, now the second-fastest growing segment of the cybersecurity market.

There are a few things at ExtraHop that have been true for as long as the company has been around. Those things are central to the efficacy of our platform. They're also core to who we are as a company. They matter a great deal to our customers. And they share one thing in common: integrity.

Let's start with the data.

A common theme when you talk to ExtraHop customers is that the network is ground truth. Network data is unique from any other IT data source in its integrity. It is the observed record of every communication between every system. Unlike logging, it can't be erased. Unlike agents, it can't be disabled or avoided by targeting unmanaged devices. It's always on. It can't be evaded. It can't be compromised.

Having this unobstructed visibility is a huge benefit across IT, but it's especially critical in security, when reputations and bottom lines are at stake. As we have seen with a spate of recent attacks, notably the SolarWinds SUNBURST attack, adversaries are becoming increasingly adept at navigating around traditional security controls. SUNBURST attackers could detect devices with endpoint protection and antivirus installed, and they avoided those devices to stay hidden for upwards of 10 months. But they couldn't hide on the network. You can read more about how we detected SUNBURST (and why those detections often went unheeded) in our report: Lessons Learned Investigating the SUNBURST Software Supply Chain Attack.

But it's not just about the data.

Ask ExtraHop's founders what the most central value of the organization is, and they'll tell you: "we do what we say we do." That guiding philosophy has been true since the day I arrived at ExtraHop, and by all accounts it's been true since day one.

This has always mattered a great deal to our customers. They can trust that what they experience in our online demo is what they'll see during a proof-of-concept and what they'll get in deployment.

They can also trust our practices. From the beginning, our platform has been engineered to protect our customers, using both security and privacy best practices. We've had the experts stress test this, and have been certified according to the industries most rigorous standards including SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and others.

"We do what we say we do" isn't just about our product. This integrity also extends to how we conduct our business, from the services provided by our customer success team, to how we market and sell our products and services. No gimmicks, no dog-and-pony show. We're confident in our platform and the value it provides to our customers. We invest our energy in educating the market, working closely with organizations to understand their challenges, and delivering value-added services.

Get the Report: Is Enterprise Data Being Phoned Home?

And these days, it matters more than ever.

Just as the SolarWinds SUNBURST exploit exposed the limitations of logs and agents as security data sources, it also laid bare the risks of the software supply chain. Vendor transparency about their security practices, data privacy practices, and integrations has never been more important. Transparency allows enterprise consumers to make educated decisions about the supply chain risk they are willing to incur, and work with vendors whose standards align to their own. Of course, no organization or product is perfect. But security and privacy best practices coupled with transparency about those practices goes a long way toward protecting everyone involved.

Standing on the merits

According to Gartner, IDC, and others, NDR is the second-fastest growing segment of the cybersecurity market with an increasing number of vendors emerging in the space. This is just one of the reasons ExtraHop believes that NDR is poised to be the next big thing in cybersecurity.

According to IDC, ExtraHop is a top three vendor in this category, and outpacing the market CAGR in revenue growth over the last two years. That market leadership isn't a product of brash marketing claims or sales tactics. It comes down to two things:

No. 1: The network is the ground truth source for security, and our network intelligence is second to none. We hold over 50 machine learning and AI patents, and we apply those at massive scale that the competition can't touch thanks to our cloud-based approach.

No. 2: number one? We actually do that. Our people back it up. And we prove it. Again and again.

We don't over-promise and under-deliver. We just deliver.