Full Content Inspection™ vs. IPS

IPS is Dead. Active Network Defense Has Arrived.

In 2014, longtime endpoint security leader Symantec said: “Antivirus is dead.” They were right: signature-based protection couldn't keep pace with sophisticated attacks. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) emerged from AV’s ashes, transforming endpoint security emphasis from pattern-matching to behavioral detection.

Network security is having a similar moment. Intrusion Prevention Systems are the dead king walking. The pain of managing encrypted traffic, and the cost of tuning to keep false positives in check, has forced many organizations to simply give up on IPS.

In its place, the industry has over-rotated towards reactive detection and response, characterized by alert fatigue, high cost, and still-inadequate security outcomes.

Gartner has said that, with AI-accelerated attackers now moving in seconds, conventional detection and response is inadequate. Gartner projects that new preemptive security capabilities — those that deny, deceive, and disrupt adversaries — will account for half of IT security spending by 2030, up from less than 5% today.

Trinity Cyber’s active network defense enables preemptive cybersecurity. We provide unique threat protection through Full Content Inspection™ (FCI), available with our ZTNA and cloud-delivered internet gateway platform. FCI cleans threats from content — protocols, code, files, and more — in real time. Our behavioral detections understand context and attacker techniques, stopping threats others miss. Now, as intended, EDR can finally be the last line of defense.

The Security Landscape Changed, IPS Didn’t

CrowdStrike’s 2025 Global Threat Report reveals that average adversary breakout time — the window between initial access and lateral movement — has collapsed to only 48 minutes. The fastest recorded? Fifty-one seconds.

Meanwhile, 79% of attacks are malware-free. Attackers use legitimate tools, stolen credentials, and living-off-the-land techniques that signature-based IPS was never designed to catch.

There’s also the visibility problem. About 90% of internet traffic is now encrypted. QUIC, HTTP/3, and TLS 1.3 make inspection impossible for most practitioners.

The Detection & Response Tax

The pivot to Detection and Response was supposed to save us. MDR offered relief through outsourcing, yet despite billions invested, only 28% of executives report complete satisfaction with their MDR providers. NDR promised visibility, but is often too noisy and costly to be practical. XDR was a band-aid on top of a broken foundation, promising correlation. 

The operational toll is staggering. The SANS 2024 SOC Survey found that 66% of SOC teams can't keep pace with alert volume. The SANS 2024 Detection and Response Survey found 64% of security teams are overwhelmed by false positives. Analysts spend a quarter of their time chasing ghosts. Seventy percent of junior analysts burn out and leave within three years.
Academic research highlights the signal-to-noise pathology. A USENIX Security qualitative study found security operations center (SOC) practitioners consistently report exceptionally high false positive rates. As a result, analysts often disable automated blocking out of self-preservation. The authors of the study document SOC practitioners suffering “alarm burnout,” and precious time lost to validation.

This isn't a resource problem. It's an architectural failure. Detection and Response, by definition, begins after the attack is under way. When breakout time is measured in minutes — and now seconds — “detect and respond” becomes “discover and document.”

The Evolution That Actually Works

EDR didn't just improve antivirus — it replaced the paradigm. The same evolution is now possible for network security, and it requires abandoning IPS’s fundamental assumptions.

Traditional IPS examines traffic by the packet, matches signatures, and blocks or allows. This worked when traffic was unencrypted, and attacks followed more predictable patterns. That world no longer exists. Adversaries know how to evade it.

• Trinity Cyber's Full Content Inspection™ (FCI) engine enables active network defense that gets into the fight, precisely meeting adversaries where they operate. AI-accelerated, it surgically removes threats in real-time from live traffic with near zero false positives. Here’s the difference: Instead of alerts for your team to triage, you get action — and FCI details what we did, if you’re curious.
• Instead of partial threats by packet, FCI reconstructs complete sessions. 
• Instead of signatures, FCI analyzes content semantics — protocols, files, code — at the application layer. 
• Instead of blocking traffic and breaking business workflows, FCI surgically removes malicious elements while preserving legitimate content and without disrupting your users’ work.

A weaponized macro in an otherwise legitimate document? Excised. An exploit buried in protocol traffic? Neutralized. Web pages render and files arrive. All occurring with sub-millisecond latency — it’s security that’s invisible to your users.

Best of all, Trinity Cyber delivers its ZTNA and cloud security as a managed service, with the cyber operators you can’t (or don't want to) hire. Elite threat hunters, expert detection engineers, and high-powered intelligence teams run our platform. They're yours: an extension of your team, without the ramp-up time or extra headcount.

IPS vs. Full Content Inspection

Even the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-94, the government’s canonical guide to IPS, highlights the IPS challenge: you cannot eliminate false positives without inviting more false negatives; tuning is the only path to better accuracy, and it is never one-and-done. Crucially, NIST notes that complex alerts are hard to validate at scale, further increasing analyst workload without advanced capabilities like FCI. 

When comparing IPS vs. FCI, the conclusion is clear: packet-centric IPS produces too much noise, requires constant expert care, and still leaves teams overloaded. 

IPS is dead.

FCI has arrived at scale. Every day, we protect over 3 million users, process over 1.5 trillion content objects, and secure over 200 million network assets. See for yourself: book a demo today.