The sheer volume and variety of data carried by a typical enterprise network is growing all the time and is creating a complex, noisy environment that is becoming increasingly problematic for IT, network and security teams. Keeping up with growing network speeds without sacrificing performance is a critical priority contributing to a highly complex problem that can easily create ‘blind spots’ on networks.
In a conversation with PCQuest, Bhaskar Agastya- Country Manager, Sales, Ixia India comments “Most people think of visibility as a tool that just performs applications performance monitoring, or network performance monitoring, or big data analytics but in reality, it is more fundamental than any of that. Network visibility is all about how data is collected, aggregated, distributed and served to those monitoring and analytics tools. Network visibility is also about creating a stable foundation for your security infrastructure. There is a reason why visibility is becoming a bigger topic in India. And at IXIA we believe if you can’t see it, you can’t secure it. Most enterprises today are struggling with network blind spots caused by an increase in encrypted traffic on their networks and migrations to public and private cloud environments. The reality is that security and analytics tools are only as good as the data they are seeing. The only way to truly address these common and widespread challenges is with a strong visibility architecture.”
Why network visibility and network monitoring will become one of the top 5 agendas for CIO and CTO’s in 2017?
The term "network visibility" has been in the networking space for ages, but has never been as important or relevant as it is today. New and exciting methods of automation – whether virtualization, the cloud, IoT or even best practices like network segmentation -- tend to emphasize innovation over visibility. Visibility is what allows IT to control and optimize the network, along with applications and IT services. Without it, organizational speed decreases, network problems take longer to resolve and security threats increase, Bhaskar said.
He further added that “We at IXIA recently surveyed over 220 senior IT staff at enterprises to determine what role visibility plays in helping IT professionals manage and secure their complex and heterogeneous networks. When asked where network visibility ranked as a priority in their IT programs in 2017, 61 percent of respondents named it as either their No. 1 priority or a top priority.”
Need for Important network monitoring platforms for Government, Telcos and other enterprises?
Bhaskar says that “Government organizations, Telecom companies, and financial institutions are the key verticals that are adopting network visibility. It’s no secret that government networks are among the most targeted. The stakes are high, and attackers know they must use more evasive tactics to penetrate these networks. Attacks on government networks can lead to tremendous loss, whether of strategic, political, monetary or intelligence value. Attacks on telecommunication operator’s network could also scale up to other networks through the interconnection interfaces. The intruders can, therefore, gain access to their targets irrespective of the geographical location. They use highly sophisticated arsenals, not leading to physical destruction, but stealing organizational and personal sensitive information for financial benefits, competitive advantage, and state-sponsored attacks.
What are latest public cloud security technologies those will transform enterprises and will offer unprecedented visibility across all cloud environments?
As per Bhaskar “Organizations in every market sector, even those not typically associated with technology, are migrating to the public cloud. This trend is growing because of the increased flexibility and agility the cloud offers. Whether these applications are web servers or critical business apps, they must ensure the same level of performance, security, and compliance available in their traditional data centers. In a traditional data center, these needs are met with robust tools in combination with a zero-packet-loss, application-aware visibility network. In the public cloud, access to packet data is limited, but needs for visibility remain—including the need to see active threats, monitor applications, and diagnose problems.”
Today, the average enterprise is using six different cloud services. By 2020 over 92% of all workloads will be cloud-based, but many traditional approaches to visibility are on-premises. With the growth of the shadow cloud, up to 10x more cloud services are likely to be deployed than IT expects. An effective visibility strategy needs to span the various virtual, hybrid, public, and private cloud environments.
A serverless architecture that scales with distributed software systems built for cloud scale, which delivers intelligent, resilient, proactive public-cloud visibility and Network-level solution that provides Visibility-as-a-Service (VaaS) through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) will be able to address the challenges associated with the granular data access in the cloud. Designed from the ground up to retain the elastic scale, flexibility, and agility benefits of the cloud, IXIA’s CloudLens provides an intelligent and automated cloud VaaS that scales with public cloud .infrastructures. CloudLens Public provides an intelligent and automated cloud VaaS that scales with public cloud infrastructures. CloudLens Public has been tested to support thousands of instances.
What are challenges in the India market?
According to Bhaskar “Indian businesses are spending their IT security budget on the wrong things. Though there is an increase in spending on security there is a very limited budget allocated for network visibility in specific. Many organizations lack established organizational knowledge of detection and response strategies in security because preventive approaches were the most common tactics for decades. However, this provides enough opportunity for companies like Ixia to grow and provide businesses with best solutions and expertise.”
Does Ixia have specific plans for SMBs?
Bhaskar replied that “For SMBs, we will continue to develop cost-effective products that help our customers eliminate network complexity, offering ease of use, deployment and maintenance, and of course working with our channel partners to deliver solutions that meet their needs.”