Ensuring the overall security of your networks and your clients’ networks continues to be a growing challenge. Companies are often left scrambling to manage complex network security solutions that are capable of providing sufficient protection but are often performing sub optimally due to SecOps teams not fully understanding all of the capabilities of their own security solution. At NetQuest, we can help make sure you are at least extracting the right data from your network for optimizing your network security solution. Here’s what you should know about how you can use enriched metadata to enhance network visibility and security and how to get the assistance you need with ongoing cybersecurity demands and challenges.
What Is Content-Enriched Metadata?
Content-enriched metadata takes the process of analyzing metadata for anomalies a step further. It often uses artificial intelligence or machine learning technology to add critical information to segments of metadata. Enriched metadata easily organizes and classifies information and allows you to use search refinement to weed out irrelevant results. It can also detect important information about a set of data, including application information, DNS data, personal account numbers, names, addresses, locations, organizations, and more. This information is organized in an easy-to-access way that can be sorted, refined, and manipulated in various ways to provide nearly endless ways to look at your network’s security.
What Are the Benefits for Businesses?
There are numerous benefits of content-enriched metadata for businesses, especially those with large cloud-based or hybrid networks that may not have the resources to manually investigate packet information in the event of a security breach. Some of these advantages include but aren’t limited to:
- Enriched metadata can capture almost as much data as a packet analysis system. You don’t have to compromise the amount of quality data sampling you can otherwise obtain from rich metadata. More than 90% of critical network information is captured by extracting enriched metadata from a network, which is just shy of what a packet analysis system can do, albeit the packet analysis system uses significantly more compute resources.
- Enriched metadata improves a company’s overall cybersecurity. When a suspected or confirmed security event occurs, your team goes into investigation mode, pulling records and data from every transaction to identify the malicious actor and what data may have been lost or compromised. Content-enriched metadata cuts down dramatically on the amount of data that must be analyzed making it easier than ever for SecOps teams to provide valuable details in real-time.
- Content-enriched metadata can help you understand the intent and tactics of would-be hackers. To effectively fight malicious entities that would benefit from the theft of your company’s sensitive information, you need to put security in context. Enriched metadata helps your organization better understand the TTP (tactics, techniques, and procedures) of hackers that attempt to infiltrate your network and steal data. This information can then help you make decisions about additional security layers you may want to consider adding to prevent similar attacks in the future.
- Personal Identifiable Information (PII) can be more easily extracted, removed, or protected in enriched metadata systems than blob-type data (packets, images, videos, speech) that require detailed extraction algorithms.
- Network security solutions leveraging content-enriched metadata use only about 2 to 10% of the storage and compute resources when compared to solutions relying solely on full packet analysis. The reason is that the metadata uses a fixed number of defined fields to summary each specific network flow. In other words, you get the who, when, what, and where (the analytics figures out why) of the conversation rather than having to watch, listen and store the data for a whole conversation between two people.
As cybersecurity threats continue to evolve, organizations must stay at the forefront of keeping their networks and sensitive data safe. Enriched metadata evolves along with threats, providing dynamic intel on how a threat operates, helping you isolate the attack and develop new security measures to eliminate ongoing threats.
How NetQuest Can Help You Deploy Content-Enriched Metadata
Migrating network security solutions from packet-based data capture systems to enriched metadata analysis can seem like an overwhelming task, especially when your team is already maxed out meeting the needs of your business and its clients. NetQuest has been providing sophisticated cybersecurity and network monitoring solutions to businesses since 1987 and can help your company tailor a customized security strategy to meet your specific industry’s needs. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your company obtain a secure, easy-to-navigate network security solution that keeps your data as safe as possible.