Aviva Zacks of Safety Detectives had the pleasure of interviewing Mike Campfield, ExtraHop’s VP of Global Security Programs. She asked him what makes his company different and he told her about ExtraHop’s cloud-native NDR solution.
Safety Detectives: What was your cybersecurity journey and what do you love about it?
Mike Campfield: I’ve been in technology and information governance and compliance for 25 years and cybersecurity for the last 10 years. What drew me to the industry is the mission-driven nature of the work. Before joining ExtraHop, I worked for a company called FireEye, which is known for being the initial leader in protecting against nation-state actors. When your everyday role becomes focused on protecting countries, intellectual property, identities, and lives, the work gains a higher purpose and mission.
SD: Tell me about the ExtraHop platform.
MC: ExtraHop is a 14-year old company with a heritage in IT operations and specifically network performance management. Over that time, we have specialized in extracting insights or features off the network or the wire, which has allowed us to become the most enterprise-ready network detection and response (NDR) solution. Unless you can talk about the protocols and the fluency of IT applications and infrastructure, you can’t solve the problems of network security.
I was hired a little over three years ago to bring ExtraHop’s security lineage into focus, which we’ve done, and we’ve dominated the NDR market. Today, ExtraHop is a cloud-native NDR solution, which means we provide visibility, detection and response across core networks, distribution centers, remote offices, and the cloud. When you think about organizations—whether it’s government, private sector, education, healthcare, or finance—they all have security problems across all of their real estates, whether it’s the on-premise or hybrid enterprise. ExtraHop has been extracting insights off the network for 14 years and has codified that into our NDR solution that we see today, which is called Reveal(x).
SD: What companies use your services?
MC: Our main verticals are financial services, healthcare, retail, and government. We help the world’s leading enterprises including The Home Depot, Credit Suisse, Liberty Global, and Caesars Entertainment detect threats, ensure the availability of critical applications, and secure their investment in the cloud.
SD: What sets you apart from your competition?
MC: If you think about the enterprise readiness that ExtraHop has been going through for 14 years, we have a 10-year advantage on our network security counterparts that have come up in the NDR category over the last five or so years. We have an unmatched ability to understand the IT environment and to scale and roll out enterprise readiness.
ExtraHop is the only company delivering a cloud-native NDR solution. Our ability to be a software-as-a-service offering as well as an on-premise offering gives our customers ultimate choice and flexibility. If you can take away the friction and the burden of supporting and deploying technology like we can do with Reveal(x) 360, you address the biggest challenge in cybersecurity.
Add in our ability to reduce the burden that security analysts have in understanding, triaging, and fixing their security incidents. ExtraHop addresses not only the challenge of putting up and managing security platforms but also the onus of reacting to those alerts and incidents that happen inside an organization.
SD: How would you say cybersecurity is changing now that we’re living through a pandemic?
MC: Cybersecurity has changed from prevention to what we like to call post-compromise, meaning that you have to believe that adversaries are going to get in your networks and you’re going to have to quickly identify, detect and mitigate them.
In making the overnight shift to work-from-home operations, organizations had to rapidly open up their networks and provide a secure gateway for remote workers using both work and personal devices, which is a tremendous change. For those working in the data centers, they lost their secure access or gateway, which has created an entire paradigm shift.Moving forward, the cybersecurity industry will continue investing heavily in cloud-based security solutions that can catch up with the recent and rapid cloud adoption. That’s why we’re excited about ExtraHop Reveal(x) 360, which delivers a no-footprint NDR solution helping enterprises protect increasingly distributed enterprise environments.