As business becomes increasingly data driven, security protocols once based on restriction do not serve a market being rebuilt on a foundation of accessibility. Despite this need for openness, risks of malware and other data corruptions continue to plague the enterprise, pushing technology companies to innovate in their approaches to security.

“It used to be that the model for protection was, you loaded up your end point with a bunch of defenses, [but] so few devices now are ready to be managed with an agent,” said Barbara Kay (pictured), senior director of security product marketing at Extrahop Networks Inc. “You can’t control those endpoints the same way we used to. We have to think differently about the problem.”

Kay met with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, to discuss the current state of data security and Extrahop’s approach to both protecting and fully utilizing the data being transmitted across customer networks. (* Disclosure below.)

A new perspective on security

Kay joined ExtraHop in the midst of its transition from a network performance-centric company to one focused strongly on optimizing in the cybersecurity space. “We knew how important it was to help the people in the Security Operations Group be more effective, get to the root cause, and get on with life more quickly,” she said.

As ransomware and other issues remain a threat to data security, the company is utilizing improved analytics to shine a light on weak spots in data repositories with historically little visibility.

“That’s what network traffic analytics is doing, taking that rich data and putting it to work and making it insightful for real problems in terms of east-west attacks and late-stage attack activities,” Kay said.

ExtraHop is also leveraging machine learning technology to extrapolate learnings from contextual data and translate them into investigative insights.

“[We’re] taking the rich data that we collect off of the network and extracting from it meaningful metrics that are beneficial from a security perspective. We send that to the cloud, [which] then uses models that are designed for security to extract behavioral implications,” Kay stated.

While larger enterprise companies are typically the ones most concerned with major security risks, the interconnectedness of the cloud means that businesses of all sizes must double down on security efforts — or risk threatening the health of the entire network.

“It isn’t necessarily about size; it’s about your perspective on security. If your services went down or your database were stolen, how crippling would that be for your business?” Kay concluded.

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: ExtraHop Networks Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Extrahop nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE