What are the common use cases of NDR solutions in enterprise security?
1. Detecting Lateral Movement and Internal Reconnaissance
2. Visibility Into Encrypted Traffic Without Breaking It
3. Monitoring Cloud, Hybrid, and Containerized Environments
4. Improving Incident Response Through High-Fidelity Forensics
5. Proactive Threat Hunting and Early Detection
Introduction
Most attacks today don’t start with obvious signatures. They enter through exposed services, hide inside encrypted channels, and move data in and out of the network while appearing legitimate. That’s why NDR solutions are vital in cybersecurity. They monitor how devices, identities, applications, and workloads actually communicate on the wire, detecting threats like zero-day exploitation, living-off-the-land activity, and fileless malware that bypass traditional antivirus and logging tools.
Gartner renamed the category from NTA to NDR in 2020 as solutions expanded beyond traffic statistics to include detection, investigation, and response grounded in network evidence, driven by increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, including advanced persistent threats.
With over 80% of enterprise network flows encrypted, NDR examines this traffic using metadata, session characteristics, and protocol behavior instead of decryption, ensuring safety, speed, and compliance. NDR establishes a baseline of normal network behavior using observed traffic patterns, identifying anomalies such as suspicious outbound connections, unexpected inbound sessions, and unauthorized data movement.
The global NDR market is projected to grow from USD 3.68 billion in 2025 to USD 5.82 billion by 2030, fueled by the need for continuous monitoring across distributed networks. NDR solutions ingest large volumes of raw packets and session data to provide deep visibility into network activity, expose sensitive data movement, and support incident response with verifiable evidence, not assumptions.
By integrating with SIEM, EDR, and SOAR, NDR strengthens security posture by anchoring detections to what actually happened on the network and enabling response actions within existing security operations workflows.
What is NDR Solution in Cybersecurity?
A Network Detection and Response (NDR) solution is a cybersecurity tool that continuously monitors north-south and internal network traffic for malicious activity, anomalies, or policy violations. Unlike traditional signature-based systems, NDR uses network evidence, protocol analysis, and behavioral context, supported by analytics and threat intelligence, to detect suspicious patterns such as command-and-control activity, data exfiltration attempts, unauthorized inbound access, insider threats, and lateral movement across an organization’s network.
Rather than relying primarily on machine learning models, NDR solutions focus on session-level visibility, artifact reconstruction, and packet-based inspection to surface attacker behavior that blends into normal traffic. NDR tools deploy sensors to passively collect and analyze full-fidelity network traffic across all ports and protocols in physical, virtual, and cloud-supported environments without impacting performance.
Emerging in the early 2010s, NDR is part of the SOC visibility triad alongside endpoint detection and response (EDR) and security information and event management (SIEM), providing authoritative network-level evidence to complement endpoint and log-based telemetry.
Key features and benefits of NDR solutions include:
- Real-time visibility into ingress and egress network activity and threats
- Evidence-driven response capabilities to support blocking, isolation, or containment workflows
- Continuous monitoring across all users, devices, and network technologies from data center to hybrid and cloud-supported environments
- Integration with other cybersecurity tools like SOAR to operationalize network detections
- Evolution from basic network traffic analysis (NTA) to investigation-grade detection and response
- Support for cybersecurity management by reducing investigation time and uncertainty, not just alert volume
The 5 Most Impactful Use Cases of NDR Solution for 2026
Use Case 1: Detecting Lateral Movement and Internal Reconnaissance
Attackers rarely stay still. Once they access a foothold, they scan, pivot, and try to escalate. NDR solutions expose this activity by observing peer-to-peer communications and protocol usage at the network level, even when endpoints lack coverage or context.
Lateral movement remains a challenge because many tools were not designed to analyze internal traffic with full session visibility. According to NIST, internal reconnaissance often goes unnoticed for days because standard tools weren’t designed to analyze east-west traffic at scale. Network behavior analysis gives security teams the ability to baseline normal peer-to-peer communication and immediately spot deviations, such as unauthorized SMB sessions, Kerberos spraying, or unusual database queries. NDR solutions help security teams quickly detect attacks and MITRE ATT&CK TTPs missed by legacy network security tools and EDR.
Why this matters:
- Reconnaissance activity is clearly visible in session metadata and protocol behavior
- Privilege misuse becomes obvious when correlated with actual network access paths
- MITRE ATT&CK techniques (T1046, T1021, T1087) are easier to validate when network evidence is preserved
By correlating NDR with SIEM and EDR telemetry, organizations eliminate blind spots and validate internal threat activity with certainty, not inference.
Use Case 2: Visibility Into Encrypted Traffic Without Breaking It
Encrypted traffic accounts for the majority of enterprise network flows. NDR solutions analyze this traffic using session characteristics and behavioral indicators, not payload decryption, preserving privacy while maintaining visibility.
Rather than decrypting TLS 1.3, QUIC, or SaaS traffic, modern NDR solutions rely on JA3/JA4 fingerprints, certificate attributes, flow timing, packet sizes, and protocol compliance to detect threats hidden inside encrypted channels.
Why this matters:
- Malware families can be identified by network fingerprints and communication patterns
- Suspicious activity stands out through rare destinations, abnormal session behavior, and protocol misuse
- Data exfiltration attempts can be detected even when disguised as routine HTTPS traffic
Gartner notes that metadata-driven encrypted traffic analytics increase accurate network threat detections by more than 30% in hybrid enterprise environments. NDR reduces alert fatigue by prioritizing detections supported by network evidence, providing SOC teams with context, timelines, and communication paths.
Use Case 3: Monitoring Cloud, Hybrid, and Containerized Environments
Cloud environments are dynamic, but network behavior remains observable. NDR solutions provide consistent visibility across on-prem, hybrid, and cloud-supported deployments by collecting network traffic where workloads actually communicate, not by relying on cloud-native instrumentation alone.
Flow logs and cloud telemetry often lack depth. They rarely capture protocol misuse, session anomalies, or attacker intent. NDR fills this gap by collecting packet metadata and session data from VPCs, VNets, Kubernetes overlays, and east–west cloud traffic, enabling consistent detection and investigation.
Why this matters:
- Visibility is unified across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-prem environments
- Suspicious service-to-service communication becomes detectable
- Identity-based controls can be verified through observed access, not assumed configuration
As hybrid environments expand, network-level visibility becomes critical to maintaining cybersecurity network security and operational confidence.
Proactive Network Threat Detection with NetWitness® NDR
-Spot threats fast with AI-driven analytics.
-See everything across your network and cloud traffic.
-Investigate efficiently with built-in forensic tools.
-Adapt and scale to meet growing security needs.
Use Case 4: Improving Incident Response Through High-Fidelity Forensics
Incident response depends on evidence. NDR solutions provide packet-level and session-level forensics that allow responders to reconstruct attacks accurately.
During an incident, responders need to answer some key questions:
- How did the attacker get in
- Where did he move laterally
- What data did he access
- Is the threat still active
NDR answers these questions by preserving historical network sessions, artifacts, and communication paths, enabling investigators to reconstruct events with confidence.
Why this matters:
- Entire attack chains can be rebuilt accurately
- Containment can be validated by confirming traffic cessation
- MTTI and MTTR improve through fact-based investigation
When integrated with SOAR and threat intelligence, NDR becomes a central evidence source for response workflows, not just another alert generator.
Use Case 5: Proactive Threat Hunting and Early Detection
Threat hunting requires visibility into what attackers must do to succeed: communicate, scan, and move data. NDR provides hunters with high-fidelity network evidence and historical context to identify suspicious behavior early in the kill chain.
Hunters can investigate unexplained traffic patterns, rare external connections, or identity-to-network mismatches using real session data rather than abstract signals.
Why this matters:
- Stealthy threats are uncovered before alerts fire
- False positives drop when hypotheses are validated with evidence
- Investigations are grounded in observable network behavior
Where NetWitness Fits In
NetWitness strengthens these use cases by providing full packet capture, session reconstruction, and port-agnostic visibility across hybrid, cloud-supported, and SASE environments. Its platform combines behavioral context, threat intelligence, and investigation-grade network evidence, delivering visibility across network, endpoint, logs, identity, and cloud data sources.
By integrating SIEM, SOAR, and UEBA, NetWitness reduces noise and accelerates investigations by anchoring detections to real network activity, enabling security teams to act with confidence rather than probability.
Conclusion
Strong NDR solutions give security teams clarity through evidence. They expose attacker entry points, reveal data movement, simplify encrypted traffic analysis, and support decisive response through verifiable network insight. As threats evolve, network-level evidence remains one of the few constant attackers cannot avoid leaving behind.
If understanding normal network behavior, validating threats with certainty, and responding faster matter to you, NDR belongs at the core of your cybersecurity and network security strategy.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What are the top use cases of NDR solutions?
They focus on detecting north-south threats such as command-and-control traffic, data exfiltration, and zero-day exploitation, along with lateral movement, encrypted traffic analysis, cloud and hybrid monitoring, improved incident response, and proactive threat hunting.
2. Which industries benefit most from the top 5 NDR solution use cases?
Industries with distributed environments – finance, healthcare, telecom, government, and manufacturing – benefit the most. They rely on strong visibility, network threat detection, and behavioral analytics to manage high-risk traffic.
3. What security challenges do the top 5 NDR use cases address?
They address blind spots in north-south traffic, including command-and-control communications, data exfiltration, exploitation of public-facing services, and webshell activity, along with encrypted traffic visibility, internal reconnaissance, cloud sprawl, hybrid-network complexity, and slow incident validation. NDR in cybersecurity provides the real-time network visibility needed to detect and investigate these threats.
4. Can NDR monitor encrypted network traffic?
Yes. Modern NDR solutions analyze encrypted traffic using metadata, fingerprints, and behavioral indicators rather than decryption. This approach maintains privacy while still detecting threats hidden in TLS channels.
5. Which companies offer trial versions to test the top 5 NDR use cases?
Many providers offer evaluation programs, including on-prem and cloud-based testing environments. Enterprises typically run proof-of-value engagements to validate real network detection and response performance.
6. Which NDR solutions provide automated response features for the top 5 use cases?
Some tools integrate with SOAR platforms to automate isolation, blocking, and enrichment steps. The value comes from connecting network detection and response solutions to broader response playbooks.
7. Where can I find detailed case studies on the top 5 use cases of NDR tools?
Case studies are available from trusted cybersecurity research groups, government advisories, and independent analysts like Gartner and NIST, offering evidence-backed insight into network threat detection use cases.
8. Which managed security service providers support the top 5 NDR use cases?
Most MSSPs now incorporate NDR in their service stack to monitor hybrid environments, detect lateral movement, and support forensic investigations. These services often enhance existing cybersecurity network security programs.
