A Match Made in the Cloud: Mercury and Netography

by Netography Team on June 8, 2023

A Match Made in the Cloud: Mercury and Netography

By Netography Team

It’s not often that two companies can speak about how they truly empower each other with their innovative technology solutions. But in a recent conversation, Martin Roesch, CEO of Netography, and Branden Wagner, senior information security manager at Mercury discussed the “better together” relationship that is helping both companies build for security and scale.

Here are some highlights from their discussion, including the catalyst for the relationship, how Netography supports Mercury with security for their Atomized Network, and how Mercury supports Netography with fintech services. For more details, watch the replay.

Why Netography
Branden explained that Mercury is a cloud-first fintech company, so all their infrastructure is in the cloud and employees work from wherever they are, all over the world. During an FS-ISAC working group meeting, Branden was struck by the challenges financial services companies face when they rely primarily on transport layer security (TLS) inspection and packet capture to secure their infrastructure and ignore metadata and the insights it can provide without ever having to do packet decryption. According to Branden, “Network infrastructure breeds complexity, so the sooner you can get effective network monitoring and security in place the better.”

Sponsorships Available

His search for a better approach brought him to Netography and flow monitoring. Branden knew the background of the leadership team – from building Snort to creating a metadata analytics-based tool. And after the proof of concept and experience working with the Netography team, his decision to select the Netography Fusion platform was made.

Network visibility
With Netography, the benefits of visualizing data versus pouring through logs became apparent immediately. Visibility into which devices are talking to each other and why, instead of just looking at code, revealed activities including an attempted brute force attack that had been able to stay below the radar. Overlaying the network map with the actual map highlighted differences in intended and actual configurations and enabled the Mercury team to instantly see an attempted protocol downgrade attack because of server configuration differences. They quickly blocked these attacks and wrote policy to standardize configurations seamlessly across the network. To assist with operational governance, they also set up alerts for notifications when something deviates.

Fast and comprehensive
Like Mercury, Netography is a cloud-native platform. So, deployment happened in minutes – from populating Netography Fusion with data, to visualization and gaining insights for action. Today, an estimated 95% of the network is covered by Netography, and the team is planning to continue to scale to 100% for informative and actionable data across the entire network.

Actionable insights
According to Branden, “Context labeling capabilities brought extreme visibility, for example making it easy to differentiate Snowflake data from GitHub data and get host names all without having to check IP addresses.” Additionally, custom dashboards help them address questions from key audiences like auditors, and tailor views to better understand the network topology and what’s happening. Netography also integrates with Mercury’s SIEM platform where they can add more context and take action, as well as with Slack and email for alerting and data sharing. Mercury is currently looking at leveraging more of Netography’s APIs which can help accelerate and simplify onboarding of devices, context integrations, and response and remediation across more of the infrastructure.

Branden credits Netography’s flexibility in a constantly evolving environment, with recommendations and solutions to keep them secure, as the key to a successful partnership and continued growth. The feeling is mutual.

Netography on becoming a Mercury customer
When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, Netography needed a new commercial banking partner fast and turned to Mercury. Mercury has a stellar reputation among CEOs at early-stage companies. And since Netography had a pre-existing relationship with Mercury as a customer of the Netography Fusion platform, they were able to stand up the new relationship in a few hours and start transacting immediately on Monday morning when given access to their deposits. “Even during a particularly chaotic and unusual circumstance with SVB, the Mercury team was great to work with and extremely responsive,” Martin said.

Banking made easy
Martin quickly saw huge value in Mercury’s modern banking* services. “Cost control is important for startups. Being able to get notifications and reports in essentially real-time makes it easy to stay on top of what’s happening from a financial standpoint without waiting for monthly reporting,” Martin added. Additionally, Mercury’s mechanism to provide customers with 20 times the standard FDIC insurance coverage limit, made possible through their partner banks and sweep networks, positions them as an ideal financial services partner for the long term.

A match made in the cloud
From Mercury’s perspective, being cloud-based means they’re everywhere and nowhere. They needed a cloud-native network security partner that could understand that kind of communication and protect it so that money can flow securely. Netography is a vital layer in their defense-in-depth system, helping them tell the story of what they have, what it is doing, and what’s happening to it.

For Netography, Mercury is a trusted banking partner that provides that same level of real-time visibility into Netography’s financial picture. It’s a match made in the cloud and with open lines of communication and a common mission to build for how the world is today, they’ll continue to partner and scale securely.