Case Study: American University achieves faster, more accurate threat detection and reduced operational burden with Vectra AI Inc.

American University Reduces Time to Respond to Attacks by 20%

American University’s information security team chose Vectra AI (Cognito) to replace a high-maintenance open source stack and to get better, more automated visibility into both north–south and east–west network traffic. The challenge was to detect malicious or abnormal behavior (including privileged account misuse) across campus and internal networks, reduce false positives, and free analysts from heavy manual triage so they could focus on protecting the university rather than maintaining custom software.

Vectra’s network AI/ML captures and enriches network metadata at scale, correlates events into incidents, and adds context (DNS, machine name, user identity, threat feeds) to prioritize real risks. The deployment was straightforward and scalable (VMware sensors, campus-wide coverage), reduced incident response time by about 20%, shifted roughly 25% of Tier 2 work to Tier 1, lowered operational maintenance to roughly a quarter FTE, and improved SOC effectiveness while providing stable, supported commercial software.

American University

Eric Weakland

Director of Information Security