How Can You Benefit as a MSP From StableNet?

Infosim Global Webinar Day

How can you Benefit as a MSP from StableNet

Business Offers, Pricing Opportunities & Technical Features

 

How Can you Benefit as a MSP from StableNet

Peter Moessbauer, Strategic Alliances Manager with Infosim® discusses the opportunities StableNet® provides to Managed Services Providers

This Webinar will provide insight into:

  • Technical Aspects (Architecture, Security, Scenarios)
  • Operational Aspects (Support, Documentation, Accounting)
  • Commercial Aspects (Target Clients, Licensing, Service Levels)

Furthermore, we will provide you with an exclusive insight into one of the MSP offers realized with StableNet.

 

 

 

Contact Centre Monitoring Matters

Because what you don’t record can hurt you

Making sure your call centre monitoring solution is working properly is an ongoing challenge. Whether it’s legal, healthcare, or financial services, large organizations need recordings to satisfy compliance requirements and to resolve legal disputes with customers.

Financial institutions, which I’ll focus on for the sake of this blog post, greatly depend on having all interactions recorded accurately and stored in an easily accessible manner. Contracts could be established through verbal communication or other forms of media like email or instant message. Buy or sell orders could be entered during voice or video calls. It’s crucial these interactions are documented for later reference.

If a regulator comes to your organization and requests a sample of specific recordings on file, you need to be ready to present them. Otherwise, fines start at $25,000 to $50,000 and quickly escalate all the way into the millions. In some jurisdictions, you’re required to pay a percentage of your daily turnover for the period you’ve been out of compliance. That means tens of millions of dollars for some larger global financial institutions. Noncompliance could ultimately result in the suspension of your trading license.

Common Stumbling Blocks

Since making sure all interactions are recorded is so important, what are some common problems that you’ll want to avoid? Recording systems are built on solid, reliable technology. It’s rare for issues to originate in the recording system itself. Instead, the problems usually arise because the recording system lives in an ecosystem. The system must interoperate with a whole range of other solutions, technologies, and hardware. A single problem in any of these other systems can trigger intermittent failure to capture recordings properly.

The most common stumbling block is when a company just assumes the recording system is working properly within its environment. It’ll install the system, get it up and working, and maybe even run a few tests to verify it is capturing recordings. Unfortunately, the system may not be properly integrated with other components of the ecosystem. Configuration glitches, environment issues, or user behavior may result in intermittent failure to record. If that happens, you’ll end up with the false belief that you have all recordings on file.

Once a regulator makes a visit or a company receives a recording-retrieval request for other purposes, it will end up finding out it has absolutely no record of certain calls. It’s simply too late at that point, and the organization will enter into a reactive mode to see where any problems lie. It may then decide to perform testing in the early morning before business opens, and place synthetic calls or human calls to make sure the system is functioning properly.

Unfortunately, these types of tests only give a small sample size, which wouldn’t cover all the potentially different use cases that come into play during regular business hours. Systems operate at variable loads and with differing pathways. Synthetic calls before the start of business are helpful, but real-time monitoring during the course of business can flag the real issues as they happen. Without real-time monitoring the organization might be missing hours of calls before it even realizes a problem has occurred.

Avoid Issues by Staying Proactive

How can you avoid these problems? Doubling up isn’t just expensive, it wouldn’t actually fix the underlying cause. Instead, a good practice is to conduct tests in many different use case scenarios. During the course of the day, a system needs to monitor every step of the ecosystem to ensure the recording system is properly connecting with every individual call. All different forms of media (such as mobile devices, financial system turrets, or traditional call centre systems) need to be taken into account.

Here’s a simplified set of proactive questions you should be asking yourself:

  • Was the call connected to conference in and record the interaction?
  • Was the duration of the call consistent with the file size, indicating that the recording was captured?
  • Was the recording properly transported to the storage system?
  • Can the file be retrieved from storage?

If any of those steps were to fail, or if any other alerts were to come up during a cross-system check, you’d be able to take action in real time before it impacts other users and other interactions.

At the end of the day, reliable call recording is essential. You don’t want to risk rapidly escalating fines, the loss of reputation with customers, or even the risk of losing your trading license. All it takes is some proactive steps on your part to ensure that layers of interoperable technology are working together as they should.

Thank you to no jitter and Integrated Research (IR) for this article

Healthcare IT Reveals Network Rx

IT Heroes: A Prescription for Network Health

Each and every day, the bold men and women of IT risk it all to deliver critical applications and services. Their stories are unique. Their triumphs inspire. For the first time ever, the IT Heroes Series offers a revealing glimpse into the secrets and strategies that have won accolades for network teams around the world – and could do the same for you.

Initial Symptoms

Located in South West England, the Northern Devon National Health Service (NHS) trust serves a population of just under half a million. Operating across 1,300 square miles and providing vital IT services to a large district medical center and 17 community hospitals is serious business.

When the network slowed to a crawl, Network Technology Specialist, Peter Lee and his team were motivated to provide a fast diagnosis.

Tools of the Trade

Viavi Managing Healthcare IT

Since many life-saving tests and medical information are communicated via the healthcare network, it was critical for the team to get everything back on track fast. After receiving complaints about the “slow network,” Lee tested it out for himself. Like end users, he also experienced a series of timed-out sessions.

“I used Observer® GigaStor™ Retrospective Network Analysis to rewind the data, putting a filter on the machine. All that was coming back was SOPHOS,” says Lee, regarding the popular security software. “I widened the search to the subnet. It was an 11 minute capture with 25,000 hits on SOPHOSXL.net.”

Lee and his team had a hunch that the traffic from the SOPHOS application was abnormally high and hogging valuable network resources. But how could they prove it?

“I went back to a previous capture that I had run last February,” says Lee, referring to an ad hoc baseline established months before. “In some 20 minutes, the average was only 3,000 hits.”

With the previous network snapshot from GigaStor, the team was able to prove that the application traffic had drastically increased and was undoubtedly the cause of the slow network.

An Rx for a Network Fix

“We’ve got a call open with the SOPHOS senior team looking into this,” says Lee. “It works out to between 33 to 50 percent of all our DNS traffic is going out to SOPHOS. Without the GigaStor, I would have never known about the problem. It’s simple, it’s easy, and it’s fantastic.”

Find out how this IT Hero found the hardware issue that brought the network to its knees, and how his team uses Wireshark to troubleshoot on the go. Download the full Northern Devon NHS Case Study now.

Thanks to VIAVI for the article.

Seven Reasons To Analyze Network Traffic With NetFlow

NetFlow allows you to keep an eye on traffic and transactions that occur on your network. NetFlow can detect unusual traffic, a request for a malicious destination or a download of a larger file. NetFlow analysis helps you see what users are doing, gives you an idea of how your bandwidth is used and can help you improve your network besides protecting you from a number of attacks.

There are many reasons to analyze network traffic with NetFlow, including making your system more efficient as well as keeping it safe. Here are some of the reasons behind many organizations adoption of NetFlow analysis:

  • Analyze all your network NetFlow allows you to keep track of all the connections occurring on your network, including the ones hidden by a rootkit. You can review all the ports and external hosts an IP address connected to within a specific period of time. You can also collect data to get an overview of how your network is used.
  • Track bandwidth use. You can use NetFlow to track bandwidth use and see reports on the average use of This can help you determine when spikes are likely to occur so that you can plan accordingly. Tracking bandwidth allows you to better understand traffic patterns and this information can be used to identify any unusual traffic patterns. You can also easily identify unusual surges caused by a user downloading a large file or by a DDoS attack.
  • Keep your network safe from DDoS attacks. These attacks target your network by overloading your servers with more traffic than they can handle. NetFlow can detect this type of unusual surge in traffic as well as identify the botnet that is controlling the attack and the infected computers following the botnet’s order and sending traffic to your network. You can easily block the botnet and the network of infected computers to prevent future attacks besides stopping the attack in progress.
  • Protect your network from malware. Even the safest network can still be exposed to malware via users connecting from home or via people bringing their mobile device to work. A bot present on a home computer or on a Smartphone could access your network but NetFlow will detect this type of abnormal traffic and with auto-mitigation tools automatically block it.
  • Optimize your cloud. By tracking bandwidth use, NetFlow can show you which applications slow down your cloud and give you an overview of how your cloud is used. You can also track performances to optimize your cloud and make sure your cloud service provider is offering a cloud solution that corresponds to what they advertised.
  • Monitor users. Everyone brings their own Smartphone to work nowadays and might use it for purposes other than work. Company data may be accessible by insiders who have legitimate access but have an inappropriate agenda downloading and sharing sensitive data with outside sources. You can keep track of how much bandwidth is used for data leakage or personal activities, such as using Facebook during work hours.
  • Data Retention Compliance. NetFlow can fill in the gaps where other technologies cannot deliver. A well-architected NetFlow solution can help business and service providers to achieve and maintain data retention compliance for a wide range of government and industry regulations.

NetFlow is an easy way to monitor your network and provides you with several advantages, including making your network safer and collecting the data you need to optimize it. Having access to a comprehensive overview of your network from a single pane of glass makes monitoring your network easy and enables you to check what is going on with your network with a simple glance.

ThreatARMOR Reduces Your Network’s Attack Surface

2014 saw the creation of more than 317 million new pieces of malware. That means an average of nearly one million new threats were released each day.

Here at Ixia we’ve been collecting and organizing threat intelligence data for years to help test the industry’s top network security products. Our Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) research center maintains one of the most comprehensive lists of malware, botnets, and network incursions for exactly this purpose. We’ve had many requests to leverage that data in support of enterprise security, and this week you are seeing the first product that uses ATI to boost the performance of existing security systems. Ixia’s ThreatARMOR continuously taps into the ATI research center’s list of bad IP sources around the world and blocks them.

Ixia’s ThreatARMOR represents another innovation and an extension for the company’s Visibility Architecture, reducing the ever-increasing size of their global network attack surface.

A network attack surface is the sum of every access avenue an individual can use to gain access to an enterprise network. The expanding enterprise security perimeter must address new classes of attack, advancing breeds of hackers, and an evolving regulatory landscape.

“What’s killing security is not technology, it’s operations,” stated Jon Oltsik, ESG senior principal analyst and the founder of the firm’s cybersecurity service. “Companies are looking for ways to reduce their overall operations requirements and need easy to use, high performance solutions, like ThreatARMOR, to help them do that.”

Spending on IT security is poised to grow tenfold in ten years. Enterprise security tools inspect all traffic, including traffic that shouldn’t be on the network in the first place: traffic from known malicious IPs, hijacked IPs, and unassigned or unused IP space/addresses. These devices, while needed, create a more work than a security team could possible handle. False security attack positives consume an inordinate amount of time and resources: enterprises spend approximately 21,000 hours per year on average dealing with false positive cyber security alerts per a Ponemon Institute report published January 2015. You need to reduce the attack surface in order to only focus on the traffic that needs to be inspected.

“ThreatARMOR delivers a new level of visibility and security by blocking unwanted traffic before many of these unnecessary security events are ever generated. And its protection is always up to date thanks to our Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) program.” said Dennis Cox, Chief Product Officer at Ixia.

“The ATI program develops the threat intelligence for ThreatARMOR and a detailed ‘Rap Sheet’ that provides proof of malicious activity for all blocked IP addresses, supported with on-screen evidence of the activity such as malware distribution or phishing, including date of the most recent confirmation and screen shots.”

ThreatARMOR: your new front line of defense!

Additional Resources:

ThreatARMOR

Thanks to Ixia for the article.

Customization Nation with Sapling Digital Clocks

No matter the product, everyone has different tastes and styles they prefer. Because of this, people really enjoy the ability to customize the items they purchase to meet these preferences. Giving customers the option to personalize their product or service has benefited many different companies in many different industries.

Let’s take the shoe industry as an example. Nike has been wildly successful with the Nikeid option on their website. This option gives their patron the option to customize any type of shoe they want with any combination of colors. The car industry has also jumped on the customization bandwagon. Almost every major car company has an option on their website for their customers to customize the make, model, color, accessories and so much more.

The Sapling Company understands the importance of customization and as the manufacturer of synchronized time systems; Sapling has an array of options to satisfy the broadest of needs. We offer four different synchronized time system options, including: Wired, Wireless, Talkback, and IP. These systems include a master clock at the center of the network and multiple secondary clocks that display the accurate time. The master clock is updated with the accurate time from NTP of GPA, and then sends a signal to the secondary clocks. More specifically within a wireless clock system, the secondary clocks both receive and transmit the signal, until all of the clocks are properly updated.

Within the four systems is the option of what type of clock you would want: analog or digital. If you chose the round analog clocks, then you would get the option of the 12” or 16”clock. Sapling also offers a 9” or 12” square clock for more variety within the analog family. Both the round and square clocks have the additional options of customizable hands and dials!

If you chose the digital clocks, then you would be hit with the brand new color customization display options. While red is the standard color option, you will now have the choice between green, white, amber and blue.

Thanks to Sapling for the article.