Accelerate Zero Trust Adoption with ExtraHop RevealX
In this blog
Zero trust is a strategic approach that redefines how organizations protect critical assets in an era of increasing complexity and risk. Proper adoption of zero trust focuses on four key design principles: alignment to business priorities, an inside-out approach, access policies, and inspection and logging of all relevant traffic.
The five-step process outlined in the 2022 NSTAC report provides a useful framework for delivering on a zero trust strategy:
- Identify protect surfaces and prioritize by risk
- Map transaction flows to understand how data moves
- Design the zero trust architecture from the inside out
- Create granular policies based on identity and context
- Continuously monitor and refine based on real-time analytics
Network detection and response (NDR) platforms provide key capabilities, bridging the gap from a tactical implementation to a comprehensive zero trust strategy.
ExtraHop, a leading cybersecurity company, offers a modern SaaS-based NDR platform, ExtraHop RevealX, that provides critical functionality needed to drive zero trust adoption within your organization. ExtraHop RevealX is a cloud-native NDR platform built for organizations seeking unified, real-time visibility and advanced threat detection across hybrid, cloud and on-premises environments.
Let's explore how ExtraHop RevealX delivers key elements needed for a successful Zero Trust adoption journey.
Device discovery: Know your assets
Properly defining a protect surface requires a clear understanding of the assets that need protecting. ExtraHop RevealX provides a complete inventory, reducing the cost and time spent on manual asset inventories and expensive endpoint scanning windows. This enables the rapid identification of unmanaged or shadow devices that violate policy and often remain undetected. Tangible output of the discovery scan defines which data, applications, assets and services need to be protected. Policy enforcement can be placed as close to the resources as possible, supporting an inside-out design methodology.
Key capabilities
- Continuously discovers devices using passive network telemetry and active integrations, identifying IPs, MACs, hostnames, OS fingerprints, roles, TLS certificates and IoT/OT device types
- Correlates network identifiers with identity sources and CMDB entries where available
- Automatically creates an inventory of east‑west and north‑south endpoints and the protocols and services they use
Protocol decryption: Full visibility into your network traffic
A significant portion of network traffic is encrypted (like AD, Kerberos, TLS/SSL), which is a black box for many legacy security tools, creating a critical visibility gap. Zero trust architecture requires continuous verification of all activity. Traditional security technologies, such as firewalls and proxy devices, are designed to evaluate traffic passing through gateway devices, leaving them blind to laterally moving network traffic. Additionally, these technologies have generally addressed decryption as an add-on rather than part of the tool's core functionality, resulting in a variety of limitations such as throughput.
Key capabilities
- ExtraHop has the ability to passively decrypt SSL/TLS traffic out-of-band and in real-time
- Decryption of Microsoft authentication protocols NTLM and Kerberos with full protocol support for TLS, LDAP, WINRM, MS-RPC and SMBv3, which provide full visibility into encrypted traffic
Application and transaction dependency mapping: See how systems really connect
Mapping transaction flows is a critical effort for zero trust adoption. ExtraHop RevealX helps validate the architecture based on observed traffic, removing blind spots in the environment, and accelerating zero trust adoption by revealing hidden dependencies that could disrupt operations.
Key capabilities
- Performs automatic application dependency mapping by observing real traffic flows and parsing application protocols (HTTP, SQL, LDAP, SMB, RPC, custom protocols)
- Builds transaction views that show multi‑hop flows and how requests traverse services (client → load balancer → API gateway → microservice → database)
- Identifies top callers, called services and data movement patterns
Building and validating control points: Make policies that work
In initial zero trust adoption discussions, policy creation is often oversimplified. To deliver the proper controls required in today's modern environments, effective policies grant minimal allow-lists. ExtraHop RevealX uses observed traffic maps and transaction models to suggest minimal allow‑lists to support micro-segmentation. Continuous monitoring of post‑policy enforcement is used to detect unexpected flows (policy drift) and to validate the effectiveness of segmentation rules.
Key capabilities
- Provides validation data that shows which services rely on a given policy and predict what will break before you enforce it
- Cuts the risk of business impact when rolling out segmentation by validating rules against observed behavior first
- Demonstrates measurable and continuous real-time segmentation effectiveness visibility for auditors and executives with before/after traffic metrics
Conclusion
Zero trust is an ongoing journey, not a one-time fix. ExtraHop RevealX supports this evolution with scalable, cloud-native capabilities that adapt to hybrid environments and emerging threats. By delivering deep visibility and real-time analytics, it helps organizations move from blind spots to enforceable, validated segmentation, accelerating zero trust adoption with confidence.
If you are evaluating a zero trust adoption methodology, WWT and ExtraHop together provide a rapid path from blind spots to enforceable, validated segmentation supported by ML‑driven detection. Contact WWT to schedule an ExtraHop visibility assessment and receive a prioritized segmentation roadmap.
Additional resources
https://www.extrahop.com/blog/zero-trust-an-introductory-guide