Network operations and security have come a long way to protect the infrastructure and its assets. With layers of security built on top of one another, the traditional method of deploying network security and monitoring creates more challenges, than it fixes. Hosting layers of network security and monitoring systems requires a continuous flow of network traffic to these security and monitoring solutions. Existing methods, whether spanning or mirroring network traffic using existing switching infrastructure do not guarantee continuous flow of network traffic. And the cost of implementation increases with each layer of security.
Organizations adding network security and monitoring must go through a tedious process of allocating and identifying network switches that would forward the network traffic to these solutions. Network teams are always varying the performance on the switching infrastructure as these network switches are not meant to copy huge amounts of traffic and forward to different solutions requiring it. And the process must be repeated each time an organization decides to add another layer of security requiring network traffic greatly increasing operational cost and time to implementation.
The solution is to offload the work of spanning/mirroring from infrastructure devices to dedicated visibility solutions whose sole purpose is to capture and deliver the network traffic to intended solutions at a line rate. Once visibility solutions are in place, network teams don’t have to worry about the performance of their network switches as the mirroring/copying is done by external systems (TAP devices), aggregated at one place (usually a network packet broker), and forwarded to different security and monitoring solutions as and when required according to their needs to analyze, inspect and detect animalities.
Organized and efficient visibility architecture greatly reduces the overall operational man-hours required to implement network security and monitoring solutions in the scope of a single distribution platform (a network packet broker), thus time to implementation is massively reduced as the network team does not need to allocate any new resources and aggregation and filtering reduces the bandwidth requirement on security and monitoring solutions by forwarding only dedicated and focused traffic.
A dedicated visibility solution can help to address the challenges of traditional methods of deploying network security and monitoring systems and can provide significant benefits for organizations of all sizes.
Here are some specific ways in which visibility can help the SecOps and NetOps teams:
In conclusion, visibility is a critical component of any network security and monitoring solution. By providing a single source of truth for network traffic data, purpose-built visibility can help SecOps and NetOps teams improve efficiency, reduce costs, and reduce risk.
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Niagara Networks are industry specialists in network visibility, providing advanced network solutions for the specific needs of individual enterprises and national large and complex networks.
Don’t leave your network vulnerable to security threats, schedule a consultation with one of our network visibility experts today to evaluate your network visibility challenges.