Detect and Respond to Threats Moving Across Your Network
Network Detection and Response (NDR) monitors network traffic — east-west and north-south — using ML-based behavioral analysis to detect lateral movement, command-and-control communications, data exfiltration, and other attack behaviors that endpoint controls miss entirely.
What RLM Delivers on Network Detection & Response
Endpoints have EDR. Networks need NDR. Attackers who compromise a single endpoint quickly pivot to others — and that lateral movement happens on the network, where endpoint controls have no visibility. NDR covers the detection gap between perimeter controls and endpoint visibility.
How We Approach Network Detection & Response
Every Network Detection & Response engagement starts with what you have today and ends with something running in production — with independent evaluation in between.
Network Coverage & Architecture Assessment
We assess your network topology — on-premises, cloud VPCs, east-west traffic flows, and the sensor placement options that provide visibility into the network segments where threats move.
NDR Platform Evaluation
We evaluate NDR platforms — ExtraHop Reveal(x), Darktrace, Vectra AI, Cisco Stealthwatch/Secure Analytics, and cloud-native NDR tools — against your network architecture, integration requirements, and cloud coverage needs.
Sensor Deployment Architecture
NDR requires sensor placement at strategic network chokepoints. We design the sensor architecture — SPAN port configuration, TAP placement, and cloud traffic mirroring — that provides comprehensive coverage without network performance impact.
Detection Tuning & Response Integration
NDR ML models require tuning for your specific environment. We design the tuning approach and the SOAR integration that converts NDR detections into automated response actions — isolating compromised hosts, blocking C2 communications.
Network Detection & Response Evaluation Criteria
What follows is the Network Detection & Response evaluation checklist we actually use — the criteria that predict outcomes rather than demo well.
East-West Coverage
Most breaches involve lateral movement within the network. Evaluate east-west traffic visibility — internal network monitoring between segments, not just perimeter monitoring of north-south traffic.
Encrypted Traffic Analysis
Modern attack traffic is predominantly encrypted. Evaluate the platform's encrypted traffic analysis capabilities — JA3/JA3S fingerprinting, certificate anomaly detection, and behavioral analysis of encrypted flows.
Cloud Network Coverage
On-premises NDR sensors don't cover cloud VPC traffic. Evaluate cloud-native NDR capabilities — VPC Traffic Mirroring integration, cloud flow log analysis — for your cloud workload environments.
Alert Quality
NDR generates large volumes of detections. Evaluate the alert quality — specifically the false positive rate and the severity accuracy of detections — for your specific network environment before committing.
Integration with EDR
NDR and EDR tell complementary parts of the same story. Evaluate the integration between NDR detections and EDR telemetry — the ability to correlate network-level detections with endpoint activity for faster investigation.
Bandwidth & Performance Impact
NDR sensor traffic analysis can impact network performance. Evaluate the performance overhead of sensor deployment and the sampling strategy used for high-bandwidth links.
"We had three overlapping security tools doing the same job. RLM helped us rationalize the stack, cut spend by 30%, and actually improve our detection coverage in the process."
Independent means we will tell you when the answer is to keep what you have.
Where This Matters Most
Sector-specific considerations we see repeatedly in security engagements.
A Sample of the Security Providers We Evaluate
RLM is vendor neutral. These are among 600+ providers in our evaluation set — inclusion here is not an endorsement, and we are paid by the provider you choose, not by any provider in particular. How that works →
Ready to Get Network Detection & Response Right?
Start with a no-cost conversation with an RLM security advisor — vendor neutral, no agenda, just clarity on where your gaps are and the right path to close them.
Talk to a Security Advisor