A security team needs to analyze network data while managing storage. What is the best data collection method?

NetFlow is a powerful network protocol that is primarily used for collecting and monitoring the flow of IP traffic in a network. It provides valuable insights while being efficient in terms of storage and processing. With NetFlow, only summary information about the traffic flows is collected instead of capturing all packet data, which significantly reduces the amount of data stored. This makes it an ideal choice for analyzing network behavior and performance without overwhelming storage resources.

By capturing flow records rather than complete packets, NetFlow allows security teams to conduct effective network analysis while maintaining manageability of their storage needs. The concise data representation focuses on the essential attributes of network traffic, such as source and destination IP addresses, ports, and protocols, which are highly valuable for identifying trends, detecting anomalies, and supporting incident response efforts.

In contrast, while packet captures provide detailed information about every packet transmitted over the network, they tend to generate large amounts of data that can overwhelm storage systems and complicate analysis. System logs can provide useful information about system and application events but lack the network traffic insights that are critical for understanding network performance. SOAP is a protocol used for exchanging structured information in web services, making it irrelevant in the context of network data analysis. Thus, the selection of NetFlow as the best data