Security Breaches Keep Network Teams Busy

Network Instruments study shows that network engineers are spending more of their day responding to breaches and deploying security controls.

This should come as no big surprise to most network teams. As security breaches and threats proliferate, they’re spending a lot of time dealing with security issues, according to a study released Monday.

Network Instruments’ eighth annual state of the network report shows that network engineers are increasingly consumed with security chores, including investigating security breaches and implementing security controls. Of the 322 network engineers, IT directors and CIOs surveyed worldwide, 85% said their organization’s network team was involved in security. Twenty percent of those polled said they spend 10 to 20 hours per week on security issues.

Security Breaches Keep Network Teams Busy

Almost 70% said the time they spend on security has increased over the past 12 months; nearly a quarter of respondents said the time spend increased by more than 25%.

The top two security activities keeping networking engineers busy are implementing preventative measures and investigating attacks, according to the report. Flagging anomalies and cleaning up after viruses or worms also are other top time sinks for network teams.

“Network engineers are being pulled into every aspect of security,” Brad Reinboldt, senior product manager for Network Instruments, the performance management unit of JDSU, said in a prepared statement

Security Breaches Keep Network Teams Busy

Network teams are drawn into security investigations and preparedness as high-profile security breaches continue to make headlines. Last year, news of the Target breach was followed by breach reports from a slew of big-name companies, including Neiman Marcus, Home Depot, and Michaels.

A report issued last September by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Experian showed that data breaches are becoming more frequent. Of the 567 US executives surveyed, 43 percent said they had experienced a data breach, up from 33% in a similar survey in 2013. Sixty percent said their company had suffered more than one data breach in the past two years, up from 52% in 2013.

According to Network Instruments’ study, syslogs were as the top method for detecting security issues, with 67% of survey respondents reporting using them. Fifty-seven percent use SNMP while 54% said they use anomalies for uncovering security problems.

In terms of security challenges, half of the survey respondents ranked correlating security and network performance as their biggest problem.

The study also found that more than half of those polled expect bandwidth to grow by more than 51% next year, up from the 37% from last year’s study who expected that kind of growth. Several factors are driving the demand, including users with multiple devices, larger data files, and unified communications applications, according to the report.

The survey also queried network teams about their adoption of emerging technologies. It found that year-over-year implementation rates for 40 Gigabit Ethernet, 100GbE, and software-defined networking have almost doubled. One technology that isn’t gaining traction among those polled is 25 GbE, with more than 62% saying they have no plans for it.

Thanks to Network Computing for the article.

How Not to Rollout New Ideas, or How I Learned to Love Testing

I was recently reading an article in TechCrunch titled “The Problem With The Internet Of Things,” where the author lamented how bad design or rollout of good ideas can kill promising markets. In his example, he discussed how turning on the lights in a room, through the Internet of Things (IoT), became a five step process rather than the simple one step process we currently use (the light switch).

This illustrates the problem between the grand idea, and the practicality of the market: it’s awesome to contemplate a future where exciting technology impacts our lives, but only if the realities of everyday use are taken into account. As he effectively state, “Smart home technology should work with the existing interfaces of households objects, not try to change how we use them.”

Part of the problem is that the IoT is still just a nebulous concept. Its everyday implications haven’t been worked out. What does it mean when all of our appliances, communications, and transportation are connected? How will they work together? How will we control and manage them? Details about how the users of exciting technology will actually participate in the experience is the actual driver of technology success. And too often, this aspect is glossed over or ignored.

And, once everything is connected, will those connections be a door for malware or hacktivists to bypass security?

Part of the solution to getting new technology to customers in a meaningful way, that is both a quality end user experience AND a profitable model for the provider, is network validation and optimization. Application performance and security resilience are key when rolling out, providing, integrating or securing new technology.

What do we mean by these terms? Well:

  • Application performance means we enable successful deployments of applications across our customers’ networks
  • Security resilience means we make sure customer networks are resilient to the growing security threats across the IT landscape

Companies deploying applications and network services—in a physical, virtual, or hybrid network configuration—need to do three things well:

  • Validate. Customers need to validate their network architecture to ensure they have a well-designed network, properly provisioned, with the right third party equipment to achieve their business goals.
  • Secure. Customers must secure their network performance against all the various threat scenarios—a threat list that grows daily and impacts their end users, brand, and profitability.

(Just over last Thanksgiving weekend, Sony Pictures was hacked and five of its upcoming pictures leaked online—with the prime suspect being North Korea!)

  • Optimize. Customers seek network optimization by obtaining solutions that give them 100% visibility into their traffic—eliminating blind spots. They must monitor applications traffic and receive real-time intelligence in order to ensure the network is performing as expected.

Ixia helps customers address these pain points, and achieve their networking goals every day, all over the world. This is the exciting part of our business.

When we discuss solutions with customers, no matter who they are— Bank of America, Visa, Apple, NTT—they all do three things the same way in their networks:

  • Design—Envision and plan the network that meets their business needs
  • Rollout—Deploy network upgrades or updated functionality
  • Operate—Keep the production network seamlessly providing a quality experience

These are the three big lifecycle stages for any network design, application rollout, security solution, or performance design. Achieving these milestones successfully requires three processes:

  • Validate—Test and confirm design meets expectations
  • Secure— Assess the performance and security in real-world threat scenarios
  • Optimize— Scale for performance, visibility, security, and expansion

So when it comes to new technology and new applications of that technology, we are in an amazing time—evidenced by the fact that nine billion devices will be connected to the Internet in 2018. Examples of this include Audio Video Bridging, Automotive Ethernet, Bring Your Own Apps (BYOA), etc. Ixia sees only huge potential. Ixia is a first line defense to creating the kind of quality customer experience that ensures satisfaction, brand excellence, and profitability.

Additional Resources:

Article: The Problem With The Internet Of Things

Ixia visibility solutions

Ixia security solutions

Thanks to Ixia for the article.

What if Sony Used Ixia’s Application and Threat Intelligence Processor (ATIP)?

Trying to detect intrusions in your network and extracting data from your network is a tricky business. Deep insight requires a deep understanding of the context of your network traffic—where are connections coming from, where are they going, and what are the specific applications in use. Without this breadth of insight, you can’t take action to stop and remediate attacks, especially from Advanced Persistent Threats (APT).

To see how Ixia helps its customers gain this actionable insight into the applications and threats on their network, we invite you to watch this quick demo of Ixia’s Application and Threat Intelligence Processor (ATIP) in action. Chief Product Officer Dennis Cox uses Ixia’s ATIP to help you understand threats in real time, with the actual intrusion techniques employed in the Sony breach.

Additional Resources:

Ixia Application and Threat Intelligence Processor

Thanks to Ixia for the article.

Flow-Based Network Intelligence You Can Depend On

NetFlow Auditor is a complete and flexible toolkit for flow based network analysis, which includes real-time analysis, long-term trending and base-lining.

NetFlow Auditor uses NetFlow based analysis as opposed to the traditional network analysis products which focus on the health of network gateway devices with basic information and overview trends.

Netflow analysis looks at end-to-end performance using a technological approach that is largely independent of the underlying network infrastructure thus providing greater visibility of the IP environment as a whole.

NetFlow Auditor provides an entire team in a box and is focussed on delivering four main value propositions for reporting for IP based networks:

NetFlow Auditor Network Performance

Network Performance

 NetFlow Auditor Network Security

Network Secutiry
NetFlow Auditor Anomaly Detection

Network Intelligence

 NetFlow Auditor Network Team in a Box

Network Accounting

Network Performance

Bandwidth management, bottleneck identification and alerting, resource and capacity planning, asset management, content management, quality of service

Network Security

Network data forensics and anomaly detection, e-security surveillance, network abuse, P2P discovery, access management, Compliance, track and trace and risk management

Network Intelligence

Network Anomaly Detection and Data metrics.

Network Accounting

Customer billing management for shared networks which translates to other costs, invoicing, bill substantiation, chargeback, 95th Percentile, total cost of ownership, forecasting, Information Technology ROI purchases substantiation.

How NetFlow Auditor Shines

Scalability – NetFlow Auditor can handle copious amounts of flows per second and therefore key data won’t be missed when pipes burst or when flows increases. Auditor can analyze large network cores, distribution and edge points. This includes point solutions or multi-collector hierarchies.

Granularity- NetFlow Auditor provides complete drill down tools to fully explore the data and to perform Comparative Base-lining in real time and over long term. This gives users the ability to see Network data in all perspectives.

Flexibility – NetFlow Auditor allows easy customization of every aspect of the system from tuning of data capture to producing templates and automated Reporting and Alerting thus decreasing the workload for engineers, management and customers.

Anomaly Detection – NetFlow Auditor’s ability to learn a baseline on any kind of data is unsurpassed. The longer it runs the smarter it becomes.

Root Cause Analysis – NetFlow Auditor’s drill filter and discovery tool allows real-time forensic and trending views, with threshold alerting and scheduled reporting.

QoS Analysis – NetFlow Auditor can help analyze VoIP impact, and Multicast and Separate traffic by Class of Service and by Location.

Key Issued Solved using Flow-Based Network Management

Absolute Visibility – As businesses use their data networks to deliver more applications and services, the monitoring and managing the network for problems performance can become a challenge. NetFlow Auditor real time monitoring and improve reaction times to solve network issues such as identifying and shutting down malicious traffic when it appears on the network.

Compliance and Risk – System relocations, Business and System Mergers.

Convergence – Organizations that are moving disparate networks to a converged platform in an effort to streamline costs and increase productivity can use NetFlow Auditor to understand its impact on security and to address security blind spots in the converged network

Proactive Network Management – NetFlow Auditor can be used as a tool by Risk Management to reduce risk and improve incident management by comparing normal network behaviours and performance at different times of the day to compare the current problems with a baseline.

Customers include Internet Service Providers, Banks, Education, Healthcare and Utilities such as:

  • Bell Aliant
  • KDDI
  • BroadRiver
  • First Digital
  • NSW Department of Education and Training
  • IBM
  • StreamtheWorld
  • Desjardins Bank
  • Commonwealth Bank of Australia
  • Miami Dade County
  • Miami Herald
  • Sheridan College
  • Mitsui Sumitomo
  • Caprock Energy
  • Zesco Electricity
  • Self Regional Healthcare

Thanks to NetFlow Auditor for the article.

Solving 3 Key Network Security Challenges

With high profile attacks from 2014 still fresh on the minds of IT professionals and almost half of companies being victims of an attack during the last year, it’s not surprising that security teams are seeking additional resources to augment defenses and investigate attacks.

As IT resources shift to security, network teams are finding new roles in the battle to protect network data. To be an effective asset in the battle, it’s critical to understand the involvement and roles of network professionals in security as well as the 3 greatest challenges they face.

Assisting the Security Team

The recently released State of the Network Global Study asked 322 network professionals about their emerging roles in network security. Eighty-five percent of respondents indicated that their organization’s network team was involved in handling security. Not only have network teams spent considerable time managing security issues but the amount of time has also increased over the past year:

  • One in four spends more than 10 hours per week on security
  • Almost 70 percent indicated time spent on security has increased

Solving 3 Key Network Security Challenges

Roles in Defending the Network

From the number of responses above 50 percent, the majority of network teams are involved with many security-related tasks. The top two roles for respondents – implementing preventative measures (65 percent) and investigating security breaches (58 percent) – mean they are working closely with security teams on handling threats both proactively and after-the-fact.

Solving 3 Key Network Security Challenges

3 Key Security Challenges

Half of respondents indicated the greatest security challenge was an inability to correlate security and network performance. This was followed closely by an inability to replay anomalous security issues (44 percent) and a lack of understanding to diagnose security issues (41 percent).

Solving 3 Key Network Security Challenges

The Packet Capture Solution

These three challenges point to an inability of the network team to gain context to quickly and accurately diagnose security issues. The solution lies in the packets.

  • Correlating Network and Security Issues

Within performance management solutions like Observer Platform, utilize baselining and behavior analysis to identify anomalous client, server, or network activities. Additionally, viewing top talkers and bandwidth utilization reports, can identify whether clients or servers are generating unexpectedly high amounts of traffic indicative of a compromised resource.

  • Replaying Issues for Context

The inability to replay and diagnose security issues points to long-term packet capture being an under-utilized resource in security investigations. Replaying captured events via retrospective analysis appliances like GigaStor provides full context to identify compromised resources, exploits utilized, and occurrences of data theft.

As network teams are called upon to assist in security investigations, effective use of packet analysis is critical for quick and accurate investigation and remediation. Learn from cyber forensics investigators how to effectively work with security teams on threat prevention, investigations, and cleanup efforts at the How to Catch a Hacker Webinar. Our experts will uncover exploits and share top security strategies for network teams.

Thanks to Network Instruments for the article.

Application Intelligence Supercharges Network Security

I was recently at a conference where the topic of network security came up again, like it always does. It seems like there might be a little more attention on it now, not really due to the number of breaches—although that plays into a little—but more because companies are being held accountable for allowing the breaches. Examples include Target (where both the CIO and CEO got fired over that breach in 2013) and the fact that the FCC and FTC are fining companies (like YourTel America, TerraCom, Presbyterian Hospital, and Columbia University) that allow a breach to compromise customer data.

This is an area where application intelligence could be used to help IT engineers. Just to be clear, application intelligence won’t fix ALL of your security problems, but it can give you additional and useful information that was very difficult to ascertain before now. For those that haven’t heard about application intelligence, this technology is available through certain network packet brokers (NPBs). It’s an extended functionality that allows you to go beyond Layer 2 through 4 (of the OSI model) packet filtering to reach all the way into Layer 7 (the application layer) of the packet data.

The benefit here is that rich data on the behavior and location of users and applications can be created and exported in any format needed—raw packets, filtered packets, or NetFlow information. IT teams can identify hidden network applications, mitigate network security threats from rogue applications and user types, and reduce network outages and/or improve network performance due to application data information.

Application Intelligence Supercharges Network SecurityIn short, application intelligence is basically the real-time visualization of application level data. This includes the dynamic identification of known and unknown applications on the network, application traffic and bandwidth use, detailed breakdowns of applications in use by application type, and geo-locations of users and devices while accessing applications.

Distinct signatures for known and unknown applications can be identified, captured, and passed on to specialized monitoring tools to provide network managers a complete view of their network. The filtered application information is typically sent on to 3rd party monitoring tools (e.g. Plixer, Splunk, etc.) as NetFlow information but could also be consumed through a direct user interface in the NPB. The benefit to sending the information to 3rd party monitoring tools is that it often gives them more granular, detailed application data than they would have otherwise to improve their efficiency.

With the number of applications on service provider and enterprise networks rapidly increasing, application intelligence provides unprecedented visibility to enable IT organizations to identify unknown network applications. This level of insight helps mitigate network security threats from suspicious applications and locations. It also allows IT engineers to spot trends in application usage which can be used to predict, and then prevent, congestion.

Application intelligence effectively allows you to create an early warning system for real-time vigilance. In the context of improving network security, application intelligence can provide the following benefits:

  • Identify suspicious/unknown applications on the network
  • Identify suspicious behavior by correlating connections with geography and known bad sites
  • Identify prohibited applications that may be running on your network
  • Proactively identify new user applications consuming network resources

Application Intelligence Supercharges Network Security

A core feature of application intelligence is the ability to quickly identify ALL applications on a network. This allows you to know exactly what is or is not running on your network. The feature is often an eye opener for IT teams, and they are surprised to find out that there are actually applications on their network they knew nothing about. Another key feature is that all applications are identified by a signature. If the application is unknown, a signature can be developed to record its existence. These unknown application signatures should be the first step as part of IT threat detection procedures so that you can identify any hidden/unknown network applications and user types. The ATI Processor correlates applications with geography, and can identify compromised devices and malicious activities such as Command and Control (CNC) communications from malicious botnet activities.

A second feature of application intelligence is the ability to visualize the application traffic on a world map for a quick view of traffic sources and destinations. This allows you to isolate specific application activity by granular geography (country, region, and even neighborhood). User information can then be correlated with this information to further identify and locate rogue traffic. For instance, maybe there is a user in North Korea that is hitting an FTP server in Dallas, TX and transferring files off network. If you have no authorized users in North Korea, this should be treated as highly suspicious. At this point, you can then implement your standard security protocols—e.g., kill the application session immediately, capture origin and destination information, capture file transfer information, etc.

Another way of using application intelligence is to audit your network policies and usage of those policies. For instance, maybe your official policy is for employees to use Outlook for email. All inbound email traffic is then passed through an anti-viral/malware scanner before any attachments are allowed entry into the network. With application intelligence, you would be able to tell if users are following this policy or whether some are using Google mail and downloading attachments directly through that service, which is bypassing your malware scanner. Not only would this be a violation of your policies, it presents a very real threat vector for malware to enter your network and commence its dirty work.

Ixia’s Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) Processor brings intelligent functionality to the network packet broker landscape with its patent pending technology that dynamically identifies all applications running on a network. The Ixia ATI Processor is a 48 x 10GE interface card that can be used standalone in a compact 1 rack unit high chassis or within an Ixia Net Tool Optimizer (NTO) 7300 network packet broker (NPB) for a high port density option.

As new network security threats emerge, the ATI Processor helps IT improve their overall security with better intelligence for their existing security tools. To learn more, please visit the ATI Processor product page or contact us to see a demo!

Additional Resources:

Thanks to Ixia for the article.

Validating Networks with Ixia

We work with majority the top carriers worldwide, as well as many of their largest customers and the companies who provide infrastructure technology for their networks. We’re the “application performance and security resilience” company – we help you make sure technology works the way you expect it to out of the gate, and keeps on doing it throughout the deployment lifecycle.

Today’s mobile subscribers are what we call “tough customers”: they expect instant availability and high performance, all the time, everywhere they go, and they tend to remember the “hiccups” more than all the times everything works just fine. No one has patience for dropped calls or choppy video or slow downloads anymore.

And that’s where Ixia comes in. We helps carriers and other providers worldwide exceed the expectations of their toughest customers. Physical or virtualized, wired or wireless, we can help you build and validate, secure, and optimize networks that deliver.

We do this with powerful and versatile hardware and software solutions, expert global support, and professional services, all designed to ensure user satisfaction and a great bottom line.

So what does this mean to you? What do “validate,” “secure” and “optimize” mean to you?

Let’s start with “validate,” and the beginning stages of the technology lifecycle.

To meet expectations, network designs, upgrades, and expansions all need to be carefully planned –and proven to work—before new technologies and services are put into production. For this you need real data based on realistic scenarios, and to assess performance from subscribers’ point of view.

You can’t rely on vendor data sheets alone to make decisions about new technologies. These specifications may be based on very specific scenarios that don’t address your unique deployment needs and business usage.

And since we know that retooling a network after a launch costs a lot more than getting it right before you go live, you need to validate critical new technologies yourself.

Ixia solutions are used to validate new products and services end-to-end including:

  • Equipment used in LTE networks, HetNets, and Wi-Fi offload
  • The quality of services like VoLTE and Wi-Fi calling
  • Virtualized network functions—these actually need to be validated throughout migration, using a mix of physical and virtualized testing to net the greatest insights every step of the way

Ixia lets you put new designs to the test designs against real-world scenarios, using real-world traffic. Our hardware and software emulates application traffic, scaling to millions of users, across nearly any link speed – including 400GbE.

And, we can tailor use-case scenarios that specifically match the needs of your network and customers. So you’ll see what they’ll see, and how your network responds to peak traffic and scales to meet rising demand.

We help meet two main goals for nearly every project: faster time to market, and lower cost. In one recent virtualization effort, Ixia helped a provider achieve a 25% performance improvement by identifying latency bottlenecks, along with faster time-to-market at a lower total cost.

And that’s just the beginning!

In today’s market, application traffic IS the network, and providers will increasingly be looking to monetize subscribers’ experience with applications and services.

Validating the performance of applications of the network early on in design is a critical step that can’t be overlooked, and that’s Ixia’s focus. Whether it’s games, social media, online banking, video streaming, online shopping, automotive Ethernet, audio/visual services, or the next big thing, customers expect it to just work, and we help you make sure it does.

Partnering with service providers, equipment providers, and enterprises to seamlessly and securely deliver a quality experience to subscribers and customers is Ixia’s business. Once you validate your network design, we can help secure the rollout, and monitor and optimize performance during operation.

Additional Resources:

Ixia virtualization solutions

Thanks to Ixia for the article.

State of Networks: Faster, but Under Attack

Two recent studies that look at the state of mobile and fixed networks show that while networks are getting ever faster, security is a paramount concern that is taking up more time and resources.

Akamai recently released its fourth quarter 2014 State of the Internet report. Among the findings:

  • In terms of network security, high tech and public sector targets saw increased numbers of attacks from 2013 to 2014, while enterprise targets had fewer attacks over the course of the year – except Q4, where the commerce and enterprise segment were the most frequently targeted.

“Attacks against public sector targets reported throughout 2014 appear to be primarily motivated by political unrest, while the targeting of the high tech industry does not appear to be driven by any single event or motivation,” Akamai added.

  • Akamai customers saw DDoS attacks up 20% from the third quarter, although the overall number of such attacks held steady from 2013 to 2014 at about 1,150.
  • Average mobile speeds differ widely on a global basis, from 16 megabits per second in the U.K., to 1 Mbps in New Caledonia. Average peak mobile connection speeds continue to increase, from a whopping 157.3 Mbps in Singapore, to 7.5 Mbps in Argentina. And Denmark, Saudi Arabia, Sweden and Venezuela had 97% of unique IP addresses from mobile providers connect to Akamai’s network at speeds faster than the 4 Mbps threshold that is considered the minimum for “broadband.”

Meanwhile, Network Instruments, part of JDSU, recently completed its eighth annual survey of network professionals. It found that security is an increasing area of focus for network teams and that they are spending an increasing amount of time focused on security incidents and prevention.

NI reported that its survey found that the most commonly reported network security challenge is correlating security issues with network performance (reported by 50% of respondents) – meanwhile, the most common method for identifying security issues are “syslogs” (used by 67% of respondents). Other methods included simple network management protocol and tracking performance anomalies, while long-term packet capture and analysis was used by slightly less than half of the survey participants – 48%. Network Instruments said that relatively low utilization of long-term packet capture makes it “an under-utilized resource in security investigations” and that “replaying the events would provide greater context” for investigators.

NI also found that “application overload” is driving a huge increase in bandwidth use expectations, due to users accessing network resources and large files with multiple devices; real-time unified communications applications that require more bandwidth; as well as private cloud and virtualization adoption. See Network Instrument’s full infographic below:

Network Instruments' State of the Network infographic

Thanks to RCR Wireless News for the article.

See How Ixia’s NTO 7300 Vastly Outperforms the Closest Competitor in 100GbE Visibility, Scalability, Capacity, and Cost-Efficiency

Visibility Is an Urgent Challenge

Lack of visibility is behind the worst of IT headaches, leaving the network open to malicious intrusions, as well as compliance, availability, and performance problems. Today’s soaring traffic volumes are bringing greater complexity, proliferating apps and devices, and rising virtual traffic—in fact, “east-west” traffic between virtual machines now makes up half of all traffic on the network. Virtual traffic is the culprit that spawns unmonitored “blind spots,” a breeding ground for errors and attacks.

All these challenges make visibility critical to network security and management. Customers need a highly scalable visibility architecture—one that can eliminate blind spots and reduce complexity, while providing resilience and control. Visibility relies on monitoring tools, and new tool investment can be a real budget-buster. That’s why companies need to protect their investments in 1GbE and 10GbE monitoring tools, and why load balancing has become such a smart approach. Now, as networks move into the 100GbE environment, Ixia offers the NTO 7300, enabling total visibility into multiple 100GbE links and dominating its competition.

Dramatic Design Difference

The NTO 7300 delivers the ability to optimize 1GbE and 10GbE monitoring tools for the intensive 100GbE environment and offers decisive advantages over competitors. No other solution packs as many ports into a compact footprint for industry-leading density and cost-efficiency. The NTO 7300’s one-two punch of design ingenuity plus advanced technology makes it the clear choice in every comparison. If you take a typical 100GbE deployment that requires 8 100GbE ports, advanced filtering, and 10GbE ports for tool access, it becomes clear that other solutions cannot keep up with the density and performance Ixia provides.

The Numbers Speak for Themselves

Compare the Ixia NTO 7300 to its closest competitor, and you see a striking difference in capacity, scalability and performance. The NTO 7300 commands every category for customer needs by providing more performance in 71% less space!

Ixia's Net Tool Optimizer 7300 b2ap3_thumbnail_competitor_0.png
7300: Port-Plentiful

The Ixia NTO7300 configuration fits neatly and entirely in a single 8U chassis, with many unused ports.

 Competition: Port-Poor

This competitor requires 28U and has insufficient 40GbE ports. It’s significantly lower in density, with no ports on advanced processing blades and fabric modules placed awkwardly in front.
Per Chassis:24 40GbE ports (or 96x10GbE)

64 10GbE AFM ports

8 100GbE ports

640Gbps Deduplication

 Per Chassis (2 chassis required):2x40GbE ports

40x10GbE ports

4x100GbE ports

240Gbps Deduplication

With its “pay as you grow” scalability; savings on rack space and power; a simple, rack-mountable chassis; superior advanced features such as header stripping and deduplication; and wire-speed performance in any configuration, the NTO 7300 is ideal for filling that critical visibility gap in the 100GbE environment.

Ixia NTO7300 Other
Fabric Module location Rear panel Occupy front slots
100GbE configuration 2x100GbE + 4x40GbE or 16x10GbE 2x100GbE + 8x10GbE
Advanced Processing capacity per slot Up to 640Gbps (320Gbps ingress + 320Gbps egress) Up to 80Gbps
Advanced Processing card configuration 2xAFM16s + 4xQSFP + 640Gbps AFM, per slot No tool or network ports, “the other’s” processor only
Slots per chassis 6 8
Chassis RU 8 (with AC shelf) 14
Total Configuration Ixia NTO7300 Other Advantage
10GbE ports 64 (up to 160) 80 (up to 96) Ixia (67% more max)
40GbE ports 96 8* Ixia (1100% more max
100GbE ports 8 8
Deduplication bandwidth 640Gbps 480Gbps* Ixia (33% more)
Total RU 8 28 Ixia (71% less)
*Doesn’t meet requirements

Additional Resources:

Ixia Visibility Architecture

Ixia NTO 7300

Thanks to Ixia for the article.

Network Instruments State of the Network Global Study 2015

Eighth Annual “State of the Network” Global Study from JDSU’s Network Instruments Finds 85 Percent of Enterprise Network Teams Now Involved in Security Investigations

Deployment Rates for High-Performance Network Visibility and Software Defined Solutions Expected to Double in Two Years

Network Instruments, a JDSU Performance Management Solution released the results of its eighth annual State of the Network global study today. Based on insight gathered from 322 network engineers, IT directors and CIOs around the world, 85 percent of enterprise network teams are involved with security investigations, indicating a major shift in the role of those teams within enterprises.

Large-scale and high-profile security breaches have become more common as company data establishes itself as a valuable commodity on the black market. As such, enterprises are now dedicating more IT resources than ever before to protect data integrity. The Network Instruments study illustrates how growing security threats are affecting internal resources, identifies underutilized resources that could help improve security, and highlights emerging challenges that could rival security for IT’s attention.

As threats continue to escalate, one quarter of network operations professionals now spend more than 10 hours per week on security issues and are becoming increasingly accountable for securing data. This reflects an average uptick of 25 percent since 2013. Additionally, network teams’ security activities are diversifying. Teams are increasingly implementing preventative measures (65 percent), investigating attacks (58 percent) and validating security tool configurations (50 percent). When dealing with threats, half of respondents indicated that correlating security issues with network performance is their top challenge.

“Security is becoming so much more than just a tech issue. Regular media coverage of high-profile attacks and the growing number of malware threats that can plague enterprises – and their business – has thrust network teams capable of dealing with them into the spotlight. Network engineers are being pulled into every aspect of security, from flagging anomalies to leading investigations and implementing preventative measures,” said Brad Reinboldt, senior product manager for Network Instruments. “Staying on top of emerging threats requires these teams to leverage the tools they already have in innovative ways, such as applying deep packet inspection and analysis from performance monitoring solutions for advanced security forensics.”

The full results of the survey, available for download, also show that emerging network technologies* have gained greater adoption over the past year.

Highlights include:

  • 40, 100 Gigabit Ethernet and SDN approaching mainstream: Year-over-year implementation rates for 40 Gb, 100 Gb and SDN in the enterprise have nearly doubled, according to the companies surveyed. This growth rate is projected to continue over the next two years as these technologies approach more than 50 percent adoption. Conversely, survey respondents were less interested in 25 Gb technology, with over 62 percent indicating no plans to invest in equipment using the newer Ethernet specification.
  • Enterprise Unified Communications remains strong but lacks performance-visibility features: The survey shows that Voice-over-IP, videoconferencing and instant messaging technologies, which enable deeper collaboration and rich multimedia experiences, continue making strides in the enterprise, with over 50 percent penetration. Additionally, as more applications are virtualized and migrated to the cloud, this introduces new visibility challenges and sources that can impact performance and delay. To that end, respondents noted a lack of visibility into the end-user experience as a chief challenge. Without visibility into what is causing issues, tech teams can’t ensure uptime and return-on-investment.
  • Bandwidth use expected to grow 51 percent by 2016: Projected bandwidth growth is a clear factor driving the rollout of larger network pipes. This year’s study found the majority of network teams are predicting a much larger surge in bandwidth growth than last year, when bandwidth was only expected to grow by 37 percent. Key drivers for future bandwidth growth are being fueled by multiple devices accessing network resources and larger and more complex data such as 4K video. Real-time unified communications applications are also expected to put more strain on networks, while unified computing, private cloud and virtualization initiatives have the potential to create application overload on the backend.

Key takeaways: what can network teams do?

  • Enterprises need to be on constant alert and agile in aligning IT teams and resources to handle evolving threats. To be more effective in taking on additional security responsibilities, network teams should be trained to think like a hacker and recognize increasingly complex and nefarious network threats.
  • They also need to incorporate performance monitoring and packet analysis tools already used by network teams for security anomaly detection, breach investigations, and assisting with remediation.
  • Security threats aren’t the only thing dictating the need for advanced network visibility tools that can correlate network performance with security and application usage. High-bandwidth activities including 4K video, private clouds and unified communications are gaining traction in the enterprise as well.

State of the Network Global Study Methodology

Network Instruments has conducted its State of the Network global study for eight consecutive years, drawing insight about network trends and painting a picture of what challenges IT teams face. Questions were designed based on interviews with network professionals as well as IT analysts. Results were compiled from the insights of 322 respondents, including network engineers, IT directors, and CIOs from around the world. In addition to geographic diversity, the study’s sample was evenly distributed among networks and business verticals of different sizes. Responses were collected from December 16, 2014 to December 27, 2014 via online surveys.

JDSU Network Instruments State of the Network 2015 Video

Thanks to Network Instruments for the article.