Enterprises- Ensure Application Performance and Security Resilience

Ensure Application Performance and Security Resilience

For most every enterprise, the network is your business. Your network and applications are what connects you to your customers. Maintaining network vitality for an optimal user experience is key to business growth and profitability. But today’s networks are under tremendous pressures. User expectations for high performance and innovative applications are ever-increasing. So too are the frequency, magnitude, and sophistication of security attacks that your adversaries are launching to attempt to infiltrate your network, steal data, or disrupt operations.

To achieve a secure network that is resilient to attack requires the selection and deployment of security devices such as firewalls and intrusion prevention. To meet the expectation for application performance, devices such as load balancers, application controllers and performance monitoring tools are also deployed in the network. Ixia is focused on helping to ensure security resilience and application performance in your network.

Security Resilience

The demands on the network are constant and your security must have resilience to maintain its effectiveness as it comes under attack, is challenged to maintain visibility to traffic and events across the network, or just needs an operational change to deploy the latest threat updates. Ixia’s portfolio of security solutions allow enterprises to:

  • Optimize security device investments such as IPS, Firewall, NGFW or DDoS Mitigation by helping you select the best technology with the right performance and deploying it in the network most effectively with network visibility and optimal load balancing.
  • Minimize downtime and improve operational change control for security upgrades by validating security updates and changes and providing the inline deployment tools to ensure that these changes are not disruptive to network operations.
  • Train and prepare for realistic cyber security exercises with systems that can create the real-world application loads and attack traffic required for a cyber range and also provide the visibility required to stream high volumes of events to SOC tools to monitor the exercises.

Application Performance

It has become critical to assess applications and their performance not only before going live to ensure they are customer-ready, but that performance is maintained over time by monitoring the network — ensuring visibility into key application flows, anywhere on the network. Ixia’s portfolio of application performance solutions allow enterprises to:

  • Validate and assess application performance across your network with real-world application load testing and simulate applications for thousands of wireless or wired endpoints
  • Gain confidence for virtualization migrations by testing new deployments and removing any of the network visibility blind spots created by adoption of virtualization
  • Maintain application performance and ease of operation by getting the right information to the right application performance and network monitoring tools
  • Extend the life of IT tool investments and maximize the usefulness of the current tool capacity with the deployment of physical taps, virtual taps, bypass switches, and network packet brokers

Thanks to Ixia for the article. 

Network Performance Monitoring

Ixia's Net Tool Optimizer

Visibility Into the Business

With virtualization, “Big Data,” and the sheer complexity of enterprise networks on the rise, dynamic network monitoring of performance and security provides a critical business advantage. Ixia’s network visibility solutions deliver ongoing insight into production networks to help maximize your company’s productivity and profitability, as well as its return on new and existing IT investments.

Leveraging state-of-the-art technology and techniques, Ixia’s powerful, high-performance network monitoring switches equip network engineers to meet the growing challenge of testing, assessing and monitoring complex, high-performance networks with limited access points. These solutions add intelligence between network access points and sophisticated monitoring tools to streamline the flow of data, ensuring that each tool receives the exact information it needs. Data from multiple TAP and SPAN ports is aggregated and multicast to performance and security monitoring tools, providing network operators with maximum visibility into both physical and virtual networks.

Ixia network visibility solutions:

  • Optimize traffic for monitoring with advanced filtering, aggregation, and replication
  • Extend investments in 1G monitoring tools to 10G and 40G deployments
  • Automate troubleshooting to reduce MTTR
  • Introduce “drag and drop” simplicity to streamline configuration and management
  • Expand network monitoring capacity enabling simultaneous monitoring of multiple connection points from a single port

Poor application performance leads to poor business performance: lost sales, missed opportunities, inefficient operations, and disgruntled customers, weakening the corporate brand. Mitigating this risk, Ixia’s network visibility solutions equip network engineers to leverage actionable insight—maximizing network and application performance while helping to optimize security, compliance, management, scalability, and ROI.

 

Ixia's Net Tool Optimizer Net Optics Network Taps

Net Tool Optimizers
Out-of-band traffic
aggregation, filtering,
dedup, load balancing

Net Optics Network Taps
Passive network access for
security and monitoring tools

 

Thanks to Ixia for the article. 

5 Ways to Use APM for Post-Event Security Forensics

Most security experts agree that the rapidly changing nature of malware, hack attacks and government espionage practically guarantees your IT infrastructure will be compromised. According to the 2014 Cost of Data Breach Study conducted by the Ponemon Institute, the average detection, escalation and notification costs for a breach is approximately $1 million. Post-incident costs averaged $1.6 million.

Once an attacker is within the network, it can be very difficult to identify and eliminate the threat without deep-packet inspection. The right Application Performance Management (APM) solution that includes network forensics can help IT operations deliver superior performance for users, and when incorporated into your IT security initiatives, deep packet inspection can provide an extra level of support to existing antivirus software, Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions. The ability to capture and store all activity that traverses your IT infrastructure acts like a 24/7 security camera that enables your APM tool to serve as a backstop to your business’ IT security efforts if other lines of defense fail.

To use APM solutions for security forensics for post-event analysis, you must have a network retrospective analyzer that has at least the following capabilities:

  • High-speed (10 Gb and 40 Gb) data center traffic capture
  • Expert analytics of network activity with deep packet inspection
  • Filtering using Snort or custom user defined rules
  • Event replay and session reconstruction

Capacity to store massive amounts of traffic data (we’re potentially talking petabytes) for post-event analysis

Like utilizing video footage from a surveillance camera, captured packets and analysis of network conversations can be retained and looked at retrospectively to detect, clean up and provide detailed information of a breach. This back-in-time analysis can be especially important if the threat comes from within, such as a disgruntled employee within a company firewall. It also allows companies to determine exactly what data was compromised and help in future prevention.

Below are five ways to use network monitoring and analysis to investigate breaches:

  1. Identify changes in overall network traffic behavior, such as applications slowing down that could be a sign of an active security breach.
  2. Detect unusual individual user’s account activity; off-hour usage, large data transfers, or attempts to access unauthorized systems or services — actions often associated with disgruntled employees or a hacked account.
  3. Watch for high-volume network traffic at unusual times, it could be a rogue user in the process of taking sensitive data or stealing company IP.
  4. View packet capture of network conversations to determine how the breach occurred and develop strategies to eliminate future threats by strengthening the primary IT security.
  5. Discover what infrastructure, services, and data were exposed to aid in resolution, notification, and regulatory compliance.

By incorporating retrospective network analysis, companies can use their network monitoring as a back stop to IDS and DLP solutions, and accelerate detection and resolution.

Thanks to APM Digest for the article. 

Aligning IT with Business via Performance Management

Much of the discussion around the Observer Platform 17 release has focused on how the designs of the new user interface (UI) and other enhancements will assist network and operations teams to more easily manage service and application performance.

This performance data and analysis isn’t just of value to IT but to the overall business. The challenge for performance management solutions has been providing this intelligence in a way that can be easily accessed and understood by other IT and business teams. The Observer Platform 17 both expands useful analysis available to business groups and makes it easier to use the data with systems familiar to these groups.

Enhancement: Expanding Web Service Analytics

  • Benefit: Strengthens visibility into how users consume company web resources, specifically as it relates to a web-based app’s device parameters like OS, mobile and desktop platform details, and browser type.
  • Business Value: Knowing not just “what” but “how” customers are accessing data is pivotal to optimizing web content and quantifying the effectiveness of customer-facing web interactions.
  • In Practice Example: For the marketing team launching web initiatives, these metrics provide details on how visitors are accessing the website, and enhance their understanding of the user experience by providing response-time and error metrics. Additionally, when network-based problems occur that impact marketing web programs, they can be resolved by the network team which has access to the packets.

JDSU Network Instruments Observer 17 Platform

Enhancement: Third-Party System Integration via RESTful APIs

  • Benefit: Simplifies sharing of performance data with other groups. RESTful APIs are a programming interface that utilizes HTTP requests like GET, PUT, POST and DELETE. Using this universal access method enables any solution to connect to the Observer Platform to access data or even manage the solution remotely.
  • Business Value: Other teams in an organization can interact and view performance data and analysis from the Observer Platform from the tools and workflows that they use on a daily basis. This allows them to proactively track performance of critical business systems, and view these metrics alongside business metrics.
  • In Practice Example: A support staff for a retail chain could integrate the Observer Platform into their helpdesk system via Apex’s RESTful API to monitor points of sale (PoS) on their network. The Observer Platform could instantly alert the service desk of an anomaly or system condition that could soon negatively impact users. The early alerts, performance analysis, and access to packets allow the staff to take proactive steps to remediate the issue before it impacts the PoS and customers.

JDSU Network Instruments Observer Apex

With IT playing a key role in helping businesses to develop competitive advantages and nimbly respond to changing markets, it’s critical that network teams can facilitate the sharing of performance intelligence. This also allows IT and business teams to evaluate the success of business operations and initiatives. The new features of the Observer Platform 17 mark a significant step forward in enabling the network team and IT to more closely align with business processes and goals.

Thanks to Network Instruments for the article.