Over the past year I have had the pleasure of speaking to dozens of large enterprise and service provider customers who have been experiencing rapid increases in bandwidth, application complexity, overall scale, and the management challenges that come with them. While each network carries its own unique characteristics and challenges, through those conversations I learned that they are no longer just trying to get the “plumbing” to work, but are trying to ensure application viability, customer e...

What is a Tap? Test Access Ports or Taps are primarily used to optimize ITs ability to easily and passively monitor a network link. They are normally placed between any two network devices, including switches, routers, and firewalls to provide network and security personnel a connection for monitoring devices. Protocol analyzers, RMON probes and intrusion detection and prevention systems can now be easily connected to and removed from the network when needed. By using a Tap, you also eliminate t...

Two big challenges with 10Gig monitoring are security gaps and the other is overall performance the existing security tools that cannot keep up with the overall throughput and the bandwidth of the network. As a result the 10 Gig links are growing rapidly and the backbones are getting huge. From an attack standpoint they're getting much more sophisticated and as a result the rules in the security devices are getting much more complex. A lot of the resources for being allocated now for content ins...

Between data centres, clouds and physical servers, enterprises are seeing rapidly growing complex networks. With this ever-expanding infrastructure comes the issue of visibility as data slips into blind spots when the network grows, which can be a stumbling point for businesses. Roark Pollock, Ixia VP of Marketing, Network Visibility Solutions, spoke to CBR about how Ixia is battling the blind spots with its new Visibility Architecture solution. Visibility Architecture is being launched to 'help...

Ixia recently announced its Visibility Architecture, an end-to-end approach to network, application, and security visibility. For some, the first questions asked will likely be “What is a Visibility Architecture?” and “Can it really help me?” The answer to both questions is a resounding yes! First of all, what do we even mean by visibility? Visibility is defined by Webster as the “capability of being readily noticed” or “the degree of clearness.” By network or application visibility, for example...

Today, network traffic between Virtual Machines (VMs) is skyrocketing past predictions, while network administrators continue to lag in terms of visibility and control of that inter-VM communication. As this traffic soars to more than 50 percent of all traffic on the network, the security and compliance challenges raised by lack of visibility into the virtualized environment have become acute. The financial and legal consequences of this visibility deficit are severe and of long duration, with a...

Change is coming to networks faster than ever before. While growth is a new constant in most networks, it is being compounded by new regulations, virtualization of workloads and services, changing security needs, and migration of applications between data centers and the cloud. Network and IT organizations are caught in a constant cycle of deploying new services, supporting new use cases, and managing growth – which results in networks that are always trying to get back to a reliable state befor...

According to EMA Research vice president Jim Frey, “Packet-based monitoring is a critical aspect of responsible management and governance, and establishing a visibility architecture is the best path to success.” Read the white paper, "Best Practices for Building Scalable Visibility Architectures." Learn more Watch this two minute video   Thanks to Ixia for the article.

Network security visibility is a hot topic here at RSA. Doug Hurd, technology alliances, Sourcefire (a Cisco company), spoke to our audience about how the company is improving customer security through extensibility and collaboration. Its Open Security Framework drives integration, resulting in faster time to resolution, smarter and faster policy management, and overall better security. Ixia’s Net Optics Bypass Switch and xBalancer are part of this Sourcefire open framework. With the Sourcefire ...

As a network professional, you rely on your instrumentation tools to maintain network security, performance and availability. To achieve these goals, organizations use Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) that monitor and actively intervene they detect malicious traffic and threats. Manage Network Downtime and Points of Failure when Deploying Inline Tools When deploying inline IPS or IDS monitoring tools, it is important to understand how they may introduce a potential failure point in your networ...

Accelerate Your Monitoring, Security and Compliance Performance with Load Balancing Solutions from Net Optics Are you getting the best performance from your monitoring and security tools—or is oversubscription causing them to drop packets and miss messages? Today’s skyrocketing traffic and high-speed 10 Gbps links put severe pressure on vital tools like performance analyzers and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPSs) that inspect traffic to block data leaks and malware. Load balancing not only prev...

Company relies on xBalancer to load balance and prevent overburdening of monitoring tools, while enabling tools to be added quickly and cost-efficiently in an intensive, high-demand environment Global Cloud Provider’s Upgrade Triggers the Urgent Need for Load-Balancing  The momentum toward 10G network links brings major challenges; in particular, monitoring critical traffic thoroughly in a high-speed, high-volume environment and avoiding the risk of overburdening vital tools. Companies prev...

Net Optics and VMware The Virtual Monitoring Challenge Enterprises have been utilizing Tap solutions for network traffic access for many years. Traffic capture, analysis, replay, and logging are now part of every well-managed network environment. In recent years, the significant shift to virtualization—with penetration exceeding 50%—is yielding great benefits in efficiency. However, today’s virtualization-based deployments create challenges for network security, compliance, and performance monit...

Despite worries about social media, most companies are not monitoring it for threats While businesses continue to expand their use of social networking to manage their brands and increase productivity, only a minority of firms are attempting to offset the risks posed by these services. The lack of focus on securing social networking is leaving companies vulnerable, say security experts. Only 18 percent of companies do a risk assessment of their use of social media, even though 84 percent worry a...

To battle today’s sophisticated threats, organizations need the ability to deliver Defense In Depth—a layering of strategies and solutions that collectively protect against malicious attacks. Security-Centric SDN (Software Defined Networking), using multiple inline products, is the most effective approach to delivering that Defense In Depth protection. Point security solutions, although growing in effectiveness, are incapable of consistently, reliably thwarting intrusion and preventing the compr...

A MONITORING-CENTRIC ARCHITECTURE IS VITAL TO SUCCESS — AND SURVIVAL Protecting the network demands robust monitoring that is actually built into the network architecture. Ongoing network vulnerability invites attack and intrusion, putting data at constant risk, wasting resources and endangering the social fabric. Shocking revelations of governmental spying on private citizens and businesses open yet another front in the fight for data integrity. The overriding truth is that the technology for s...

Customers with active software subscription can upgrade. This new release has the following enhancements: Added support for multiple (up to 8) egress GRE tunnels. The number of egress interfaces per rule increased from 4 to 8. One of the egress GRE tunnels gre1-gre8 can be specified as default egress interface. Changes from previous release: The interface gre0 is no longer supported as egress interface. If gre0 was configured that configuration will be lost. During 'commit' xFilter checks for ex...

“Protecting the network has evolved from an activity into an emergency.” One of the focus area in network security is APT – Advanced Persistent Threats In the past (at least IMO) APT were associated with government-like agencies but in recent times, it looks like organized groups are developing APT capabilities. APTs target organizations in industries that handle data with high value data. Such organizations include banks, Credit Unions and other financial institutions as well as Government agen...

The New 10 GigaBit iBypass Switch 4.2.2 supports more heartbeat configurations and network streams plus new CLI commands for management agility. The new 10G iBypass switch version 4.2.2 fortifies your network with advanced ways to stay always-on and protect your tools. Plus—new Web UI capabilities make configuring and managing easy, precise, and more flexible than ever. New Bypass configuration modes: Bypass Fail-Close if the heartbeat packet is not detected on either monitor ports. Force_Bypass...

Advanced Tap technology delivers seamless consistency and lower error rates, while raising signal-to-noise ratio—all in a compact 1U form factor Santa Clara, Calif. – October 2, 2013 – Net Optics, Inc., the leading provider of Total Application and Network Visibility solutions, today announced a spectrum of advanced new features and capabilities in its popular Flex Tap™ product line. Net Optics will demonstrate the upgraded Flex Tap at Interop (Booth #519) in New York. The Flex Tap resolves syst...