Network Detection and Response (NDR) Sector, Global, 2024-2029

NDR Adoption Rates are Driving Transformational Growth Due to Growing Security and IT Complexity

The need for NDR has grown far beyond basic perimeter defense and legacy intrusion detection. Today, NDR is a critical layer of cybersecurity, enabling organizations to detect, investigate, and respond to threats that evade traditional tools. As businesses accelerate cloud adoption, expand remote work, and embrace IoT and AI, network environments have become more dynamic and complex-creating blind spots that attackers exploit through encrypted traffic, lateral movement, and sophisticated techniques.

Relying solely on endpoint security and firewalls is no longer effective as threat actors bypass legacy defenses with ease. With breach costs continuing to rise, organizations need deep, real-time visibility into both east-west and north-south traffic to uncover hidden threats before financial and operational damage occurs. Modern NDR solutions provide this visibility through advanced behavioral analytics, AI-driven anomaly detection, and proactive threat hunting, helping reduce false positives and speed response times. NDR also works alongside endpoint detection and response (EDR), extended detection and response (XDR), and security information and event management (SIEM) to deliver an integrated, holistic defense.

The global NDR market is expanding rapidly, driven by demand for continuous monitoring, inspection of encrypted traffic, and rising investments in AI and ML. North America leads the market, followed by Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA), and Asia-Pacific (APAC), while Latin America (LATAM) remains relatively untapped and offers strong growth opportunities.

In summary, NDR has become fundamental to a proactive and resilient cybersecurity posture. As threats grow more advanced and attack surfaces multiply, organizations across finance, government, healthcare, and technology will increasingly rely on NDR for the visibility, speed, and confidence required to defend critical assets and reduce risk.

Revenue Forecast

The revenue estimate for the base year is $2,615.2 million, with a CAGR of 23.1% for the study period from 2024 to 2029.

Scope of Analysis

• NDR continuously monitors network traffic to detect, investigate, and respond to both known and unknown threats in real time across hybrid and cloud environments.
• The NDR market includes several types of vendors, including pure-play NDR providers, large security platform vendors, network infrastructure providers, and extended detection and response (XDR) providers that combine endpoint and network detection.
• As demand for deeper visibility and faster threat response grows, adjacent vendors such as security information and event management (SIEM), security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), and firewall providers increasingly integrate NDR features into their offerings.
• Industry discussions often group NDR with XDR because of overlapping functions, but Frost & Sullivan focuses specifically on NDR in this study to highlight its unique growth opportunities and innovation trends. Related Frost & Sullivan studies cover SIEM, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and SOAR.
• This study provides additional revenue breakdown and forecast by the following segments:

Geographic Coverage

• Global
• Study Period
• 2021-2029
• Base Year
• 2024
• Forecast Period
• 2025-2029
• Monetary Unit
• US Dollars
• Geography: North America (NA); Latin America (LATAM); Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific (APAC).
• Business Sizes: Large (>5,000 employees), midsized (1,001-4,999 employees), and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) (1-1,000 employees).
• Industry Verticals: Banking/finance, education, government, healthcare/medical, manufacturing, retail, technology, utilities, media/entertainment, and services (no breakdown for this category).

The Impact of the Top 3 Strategic Imperatives on the NDR Industry

Disruptive Technologies

Why

• AI creates both opportunities and challenges for businesses.
• It empowers hackers without technical expertise to exploit vulnerabilities and cause significant damage.
• At the same time, organizations can use AI to proactively strengthen security, bridge talent gaps, and gain a strategic advantage in cybersecurity.

Frost Perspective

AI's ubiquitous influence drives demand for NDR solutions across industries and regions.

• Integrating AI into the NDR life cycle strengthens asset discovery, vulnerability detection, response, productivity, and customer reporting.
• Frost & Sullivan expects AI-enabled NDR offerings to surge over the next 5 years.

Industry Convergence

Why

• Cybersecurity continues to converge as the modern threat landscape pushes organizations to adopt holistic security platforms while minimizing IT complexity.
• This shift will drive demand for advanced, integrated tools that deliver comprehensive threat detection and risk management.

Frost Perspective

• As technologies and systems integrate across industries, NDR point solutions must evolve to manage increasingly complex and expansive attack vectors.
• Within the next 5 years, most NDR capabilities will commoditize as cybersecurity vendors commoditize or build them.
• To stay competitive and reduce customer churn, NDR point solution providers must expand their use cases in line with industry convergence.

Competitive Intensity

Why

• The dynamic threat landscape, venture capital injections, industry convergence, and regulations drive NDR adoption.
• Start-ups offering cloud-native NDR solutions face a low barrier to entry by leveraging open-source tools (Zeek, Suricata) to cut development costs.
• This accessibility attracts more vendors from adjacent sectors into the NDR arena.
• Nearly all cybersecurity vendors now deliver some level of NDR capability, ranging from threat detection to response.

Frost Perspective

• NDR plays a crucial role in addressing the expanding attack surface created by cloud migration and IoT adoption.
• Growing regulatory pressure and requirements from cybersecurity firms will push organizations to adopt NDR, boosting both demand and competition.
• Vendors will need to expand their use cases, and this trend will continue, leading point solution providers to diversify or be acquired by larger industry players.

Growth Drivers

• Increased Attack Surface and IT Complexity: As organizations adopt cloud, remote work, and IoT, their attack surface grows beyond what traditional tools can monitor. Tracking assets alone is no longer effective. NDR delivers real-time, network-wide visibility and behavioral analytics across hybrid environments, enabling detection of advanced threats that bypass endpoint or log-based tools. This makes NDR critical for securing today's complex and distributed IT landscapes.
• The Dynamic Threat Landscape: Ransomware, nation-state attacks, and AI-driven threats are accelerating in scale and sophistication. Attackers exploit lateral movement and encrypted traffic, leaving traditional endpoint tools unable to keep up. NDR provides the behavioral analysis and network-layer visibility needed to detect advanced tactics in real time, making it essential for defending against a growing, accessible, and constantly shifting threat landscape.
• Regulatory Pressure and Compliance Requirements: Governments and regulatory bodies are enforcing stricter security standards that push organizations to strengthen their detection capabilities. Frameworks like Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and updates to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) require demonstrable security controls and visibility across the digital environment. NDR supports compliance by delivering continuous monitoring, advanced detection, and actionable insights across networks, helping organizations meet these evolving requirements and avoid regulatory risk.
• Technological Advancements: While AI accelerates the scale and sophistication of cyber threats, it also strengthens the power of NDR. Modern NDR platforms integrate AI to correlate data across networks, endpoints, and cloud environments, delivering richer context and faster detection. This makes NDR more effective and aligned with its original purpose-providing intelligent and holistic network defense in real time.
• Rising Security Maturity: As organizations grow and gain more security awareness, they are increasingly invested in tools, talent, and proactive practices. This shift boosts demand for advanced solutions like NDR. With rising cybersecurity disturbances and regulatory demands, organizations are prioritizing real-time detection and response as core elements of their information security strategy.

Growth Restraints

• Market Confusion: Many organizations still lack a clear understanding of NDR and how it differs from IDS, EDR, or even XDR. Decision makers often question the need for NDR if they already have firewalls or endpoint tools. This confusion slows adoption and reduces the perceived urgency of investing in NDR.
• Budget Constraints: Even with growing cybersecurity budgets, organizations must split resources across competing priorities such as data, cloud, and network security. NDR directly competes with these domains for funding, and in many cases, cloud and data security are seen as more urgent, limiting budget for dedicated NDR solutions.
• Service Cannibalization: As more organizations outsource security operations to managed detection and response (MDR) or managed security service providers (MSSPs), the direct market for standalone NDR shrinks. Instead of deploying an in-house NDR platform, many companies rely on managed providers that bundle network visibility into broader services. This trend reduces revenue opportunities for NDR vendors, especially when network detection becomes a background feature rather than a distinct investment.
• Platform Absorption, Commoditization, and Homogenization: Larger platforms like XDR and SIEM are absorbing NDR features. As these platforms evolve, many organizations prefer a single consolidated solution over multiple point products. This consolidation challenges standalone NDR vendors to justify their value unless they deliver unique capabilities or superior integration.

Competitive Environment

• Number of Competitors
  • More than 25 with revenue greater than $1 million
• Competitive Factors
  • Cost, support, customer relationships, validation capabilities, scanning performance, scanning frequency, and integrations
• Key End-User Industry Verticals
  • Banking/finance, government, technology, services, manufacturing
• Leading Competitors
  • Cisco, Fortinet, Darktrace, Trend Micro, ExtraHop
• Revenue Share of Top 5 Competitors (2024)
  • 68.8%
• Other Notable Competitors
  • Vectra AI, Corelight, Arista, Hillstone Networks
• Distribution Structure
  • Direct sales, reseller channel, distributor, MSSPs
• Notable Acquisitions and Mergers
  • Darktrace acquiring Cado Security (2025); Cisco acquiring Splunk (2024); Fortinet acquiring Gigamon's ThreatInsight NDR solution (2023)