Cyber Defense eMagazine May 2019

Network Traffic Analysis (NTA)
By Timothy Liu, CTO & Co-Founder, Hillstone Networks
Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) was first created and defined by Gartner as an emerging category of
security solutions that use network communications as the foundational data source for detecting and
investigating security threats and anomalous or malicious behaviors within that network.
NTA was named one of the top 11 emerging technologies in 2017 by Gartner. As the technology is
maturing, security vendors are delivering a variety of solutions that directly utilize NTA or integrate NTA
as part of an overall threat protection solution platform.
On February 28 2019, Gartner published its first market guide for NTA. In this report, it has provided an
overview of the NTA technology landscape, has set the market direction and analyzed corresponding
products from leading vendors. This is the first and most critical guide on the NTA market since the
category was first created a few years ago.
Here, we will first go over the key functionalities and elements of NTA technology. In the second part, we
will discuss some major functionalities of the NTA platform from Hillstone Networks.
What is NTA?
NTA technology itself has been around for a while. It has been widely used in network monitoring and
traffic analysis; it can help provide comprehensive visibility of the entire network to gain insights into
network operations and performance, among other things.
As it turns out, today, cyber criminals, casual or professional hackers and other sponsored organizations
are using more and more advanced techniques and tools to stage cyberattacks; these are more targeted,
persistent and sophisticated attacks and their goals often involve stealing useful user credentials, critical
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