One of the oldest principles of security is that you cannot secure what you cannot see. Visibility has always been the starting place for monitoring and protecting attack surface and valuable resources. Various technical challenges have come to bear over the years—the shift to “let it all in” HTTP back in the late 90s, the subsequent advent and then common usage of encrypted traffic, the rise of shadow IT and groups or employees empowered to incorporate their own applications, devices and data services, and more. Such challenges have necessitated new approaches to visibility.
