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 compromise of network security. That failure lays the network open to attack, with consequences spanning public endangerment, loss of personal and corporate assets, disruption of the social contract and deteriorating public confidence.

Regulators worldwide are mandating advanced protections and procedures to raise and tighten security levels. However, the network has grown to encompass social networking, remote access, and cloud computing. The resultant labyrinth of industry, national and local laws, added to the fact that many infractions result from third-party activities, makes compliance exceedingly complex. A defense strategy must take these and many more factors into account—performing effective monitoring and access control of the network without stifling the Internet’s freedom of innovation and communication.

Implementing Inline Security-Centric SDN in Your Organization

The Net Optics xStream™ Platform simplifies SDN integration, fortifies security and streamlines management. As an inline resource, this hardware and software platform offers scalability, high performance and seamless availability. The xStream Platform resides on a newly designed chassis with 24 ports or the equivalent of 64 10G ports—in one rack unit—for exceptional network productivity with an ultra-low latency 480G backplane for high visibility and performance. The xStream Platform merges three state-of-the-art products for quick link aggregation, network packet brokering and load balancing from a single platform. A flexible, scalable approach enables aggregation, regeneration, switching, and filtering of high traffic volumes with Deep Packet Inspection capabilities and extremely high port density. An expanded menu of commands ease configuration and control dramatically as well as delivering High Availability (HA) function to monitoring tools—a key benefit for networks under pressure for always-on performance

The xStream Platform includes:

• xStream 40™ —a load balancing appliance for monitoring high-speed network traffic and easing migration to 40G. xStream 40 provides extensive NPB capabilities for 40G networks, including advanced filtering, aggregation, load- balancing, and time stamping. It offers a convenient way to perform 40G monitoring with existing tools and protects investment value while maintaining security and performance, boosting productivity and simplifying large-scale network management and network monitoring.
• xBalancer™—a purpose-built solution for distributing traffic to multiple monitoring tools, sharing the load caused by high traffic volumes, offering linear scalability and preserving the value of your tool investment.
• Director xStream™—a data monitoring switch that aggregates, regenerates, switches, filters, and load balances monitoring traffic. With the highest density of 10G ports in the monitoring industry, Director xStream empowers the NOC to share a pool of monitoring tools across a large number of network links.
• iLink Agg xStream™—a high-performance link aggregator that combines traffic from as many as 20 network links or Span ports and sends it to four monitoring tools.iLink Agg xStream speeds 10G traffic to 1G appliances, and 1G traffic to10G tools. iLink Agg xStream automatically performs all data-rate and media-type conversions, enabling 10G traffic to be sent to1G appliances, and 1G traffic to 10G tools.

“Security is a Process, not a Product”

As organizations work to handle cloud challenges, consumerization, BYOD programs, mobility and virtualization, their greatest and most profound concern across all of these areas lies in thwarting cyber attacks. These have the potential to nullify all the progress and growth a company has worked to attain; steal their vital data and compromise their business goals. The current risk landscape demands an inline Security-Centric approach based on a Defense In Depth security model.

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