Why Today’s Security Tools Can’t See the Network Anymore
The observability shift quietly reshaping SOC strategy
There’s a simple reason modern security feels harder than it used to: the architecture changed, and visibility didn’t keep up.
An October 2025 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of NETSCOUT highlights this gap in unmistakable terms.
Organizations say the most important features are:
- Real-time threat detection at the sensor level (89%)
- Line rate packet capture and local storage of packets and metadata tied to real-time detection (86%)
- Visibility that scales across private and public cloud (86%)
- Visibility into traffic (83%)
- Encrypted traffic analysis (77%)
These aren’t incremental preferences. They signal an architectural shift.
Yesterday’s Visibility Model Doesn’t Work in Today’s Environment
Traditional monitoring was built on the assumption that:
- Workloads were stable
- Traffic was mostly visible
- Infrastructure boundaries were clear
- Logs could reconstruct the truth
None of that is true anymore.
Modern networks are borderless, dynamic, and encrypted by default.
The telemetry moves. The workloads move. The adversaries move.
Visibility, meanwhile, stayed static.
So, teams added more tools, more logs, more agents. But adding layers doesn’t fix the foundation.
The Real Shift: From Inference to Evidence
Security teams used to rely on logs and endpoints as the upstream source of truth. But as environments get more complex, these signals reveal only fragments of the story.
Actual evidence such as what moved, what communicated, what deviated - lives deeper.
This is why the importance of packet-level visibility has surged. It’s a necessity.
Packet-level truth is the one thing that cuts through:
- Transient workloads
- Encrypted sessions
- Multi-cloud sprawl
- Lateral movement
- Hidden service-to-service interactions
It’s the difference between “we think” and “we know.”
Why Organizations Are Re-Evaluating Their Visibility Stack
A growing number of leaders are realizing the downstream impact of incomplete visibility:
- SIEMs become overloaded
- AI models train on noise
- Threat detection becomes reactive
- Investigations take too long
- Automated response becomes risky
When your foundation is fragmented, everything above it becomes fragile.
In the Forrester commissioned study the ranking of most important NAV Features reflects a market that understands this, even if many architectures haven’t caught up yet.
Where Omnis Cyber Intelligence Fits
This shift is exactly why solutions like Omnis Cyber Intelligence are being adopted as the “visibility layer” rather than just another security tool.
We believe Omnis Cyber Intelligence aligns naturally with the new priorities the Forrester study highlights:
- Deep packet inspection and metadata extraction supply the evidence downstream tools lack.
- Hybrid-cloud scale provides visibility that follows workloads instead of losing them.
- Behavioral analysis of encrypted traffic helps teams understand intent even when payloads can’t be inspected.
- Three-click investigations compress analysis cycles dramatically, something analysts feel immediately.
Omnis Cyber Intelligence doesn’t replace existing tools. It makes them better by feeding them context they were never designed to capture on their own.
Security Isn’t Losing to Threats, It’s Losing to Blind Spots
The organizations that outperform in detection, investigation, and response over the next five years will be the ones who rebuild visibility intentionally, not reactively.
The question for every security leader is now simple:
Can your architecture see enough to support the future you want to build?
Read the commissioned Forrester Consulting Opportunity Snapshot