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. 

Ixia Brings Application and Threat Intelligence to Network Visibility

Ixia announced enhancements to its network visibility product portfolio, which extends the capabilities of its Visibility Architecture™. With the latest releases incorporating Ixia’s Application and Threat Intelligence, comprehensive solutions come together to meet the needs of enterprises for simplified and actionable network insight.

In an increasingly dynamic environment, network administrators are striving for complete network visibility. This level of awareness requires a robust visibility architecture that is able to apply context and correlation to network applications incorporating factors such as user location, granular application action, operating system, browser, and handset type across physical- and virtual-source traffic. The addition of these capabilities to Ixia’s Visibility Architecture marks a significant advancement in the tools that IT professionals can leverage to better understand the application performance and security implications of network events.

Updates to Ixia’s Visibility Architecture include:

  • Application filtering technology – Using Ixia’s ATI Processor, administrators are able to select precise geo-tagged application traffic for forwarding to specific monitoring tools. File transfers to suspicious locations or VoIP connections from a branch office with performance problems can be automatically highlighted and directed to the appropriate tools for immediate analysis.
  • New high-density platform – Ixia’s ATI Processor is available in the new NTO 6212 packet broker, which enhances Ixia’s NTO family with application brokering and NetFlow generation in an efficient 48-port 1U package.
  • Advanced packet processing and 100G support – Ixia’s NTO 7300 now supports 100Gb interfaces and 1.8Tb of advanced processing (such as header stripping and deduplication), the highest capacity and density in the industry by a substantial margin.
  • Monitoring of financial feeds – Ixia’s recent TradeView release allows for the monitoring of market data down to the channel level providing early warning of health issues with channel feeds that can save millions in revenue lost to trading errors.

Industry Commentary:

“As the number of data sources and customer expectations for always-on access continue to rise, its imperative that IT professionals have the right tools to keep networks running securely and at optimal performance,” said Jim Rapoza, Senior Research Analyst, Aberdeen Group. “To accomplish this, organizations must have visibility solutions that provide immediate insight into events in order to capture more accurate application and network data.”

“Application Intelligence is the next wave of network visibility, yielding deeper insight and faster resolution times,” said Scott Register, Senior Director, Product Management for Ixia. “Our recent advances demonstrate our commitment to providing our customers with the most advanced, efficient and comprehensive visibility solution in the industry.”

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. 

Data Security and Performance Management from Network Instruments

Network Instruments Data Security and Performance Management

Is your performance management solution a target for attackers? With increasingly creative exploits, it is important to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to data protection. Performance monitoring tools that do not keep pace can leave your information vulnerable.

TOTAL PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

The Observer® Performance Management Platform is a fully integrated solution, purpose-built to support the highest level of network security.

Its features include:

  • TLS-based 256-bit encryption for data in motion and data at rest
  • Power to keep up with line-rate during encryption
  • Network invisibility option with internal Gen2 capture card
  • Web-based interface for reduced learning curve, maximum ease of use
  • Centralized management of AAA

The Observer Platform delivers a return far above its cost, as not only a powerful monitoring solution but a wise addition to any enterprise security strategy.

Learn more by downloading the white paper

Network Instruments Data Security and Performance Management

The 5 Main Questions You Have to Ask in Network Management

Cloud Computing

Although many people may perceive Network Management as an extremely complicated and diverse area of specialty, there really are only 5 questions that every Network Manager needs to think about. The main components behind every problem in Network Management, are as follows:

What do I have?

If you don’t know what you have how can you manage or monitor it. Most of the time in Network Management you’re trying to track down potential issues and how you’re going to resolve these issues. This is a very hard task especially if you’re dealing with a large scale network. If one thing goes down within the network it starts a trickle effect and then more aspects of the network will in return start to go down.

If you don’t know what you have how are you meant to know if you need an upgrade. Numerous enterprises are paying for upgrades that aren’t needed and getting charged for unnecessary maintenance. A simple tool like automated discovery management can help resolve this. It identifies what you have, displays topology maps and automatically compiles reports.

Is anything broken?

At times, technology seems like it is advancing faster than we can keep up with it. As the industry evolves, your business must adapt to take these changes, especially if you want to stay as efficient as possible. Finding out if there are any issues with your infrastructure sooner rather than later is an obvious factor, but some people find this harder than others with the size of their IT infrastructure.

Having the right Network Management solution enables you to find the flaws early on so they don’t snow ball into a catastrophe. Continuous monitoring of all systems ( devices, services, UPS’s) are all key components to eliminate these issues, an application such as Root Cause Analysis or Weathermapping can help you manage these complications.

Why is it slow?

The number one complaint is why is it slow? Everyone always presumes that it’s the networks fault that the application is slow, in reality there is a number of issues. These concerns include over capacity of links, poorly written applications, firewall problems or even QoS issues. Sometimes it’s tricky to find the actual cause of the application being slow as most of the time there is no evident issue to be found.

What can be done? TEST, TEST, TEST, and then correlate these to come up with a realistic resolution. You can use NetFlow to get a real deep dive into what’s going on.

Cloud Computing

Is it secure?

Is my network secure is a hot topic these times with breaches occurring in some of the top firm’s applications. Company’s such as JP Morgan, EBay and Snapchat have all had security threats in 2014 with a lot of their customer’s information being jeopardized. Many wonder if these networks are safe and the answer is that that they are.

There is always going to be vulnerabilities no matter what, in the first of half 2014 there were over 400 security breaches within companies withholding personal information. As long as you have a trusted network manager you should be ok, a lot of these hacks are just wake up calls for companies to improve their security network.

Our approach to security is to create, push and perform security policies. Every network application should have a good protection policy configuration. Here at NMSaaS we can create those policy checking systems which have the possibilities to take down any possible vulnerabilities and eliminate them.

Can I recover if something fails?

In reality nothing lasts forever, the average life span for a hardware device is 4 years. The main concern is are you able to recover your data if a problem arises, and the answer is yes.

What to do

  • Back up all of you device configuration files (off site)
  • Maintain a consistent schedule of backups.
  • Have a quick and simple restoration process if something does fail.
  • There are always going to be problems no matter what, but what you have to remember is that there is always a solution to every problem!

Security & Compliance Monitoring

Ixia's Net Tool Optimizer

High-stakes Monitoring

Global finance moves fast. When data and transactions don’t take place as smoothly or securely as expected, the company’s revenues and reputation may instantly suffer, causing valued customers to seek more reliable providers. Regulatory requirements are also growing, creating a greater need for security and compliance monitoring.

To mitigate risk and ensure performance, Ixia’s network visibility solutions deliver the ongoing data needed to dynamically detect, avoid, and address issues that affect production networks, private clouds, and applications. With security and compliance monitoring requirements increasing and physical networks becoming more complex, the Ixia suite of network monitoring switches optimizes use of network monitoring access points and overcomes hardware limitations for increased visibility at reduced cost.

Leveraging industry-leading network visibility technology, Ixia’s solutions enable engineers running the world’s most demanding networks to:

  • Minimize latency and speed transaction times
  • Prevent fraud and secure data across multiple networks and private cloud infrastructures
  • Maintain compliance with rigorous regulatory standards associated with PCI-DSS and other governance
  • Maximize existing investments while evolving to 40Gbps and beyond
  • Demonstrate fairness to customers and compliance with requirements tied to Service Level Agreements

Ixia’s suite of solutions also supports testing, assessing and optimizing of network and application performance, security, compliance, and management under diverse conditions. These breakthrough solutions deliver:

  • Increased network visibility by efficiently providing network, application, and security monitoring tools the exact data they need
  • Expanded network monitoring capacity with aggregation, filtering, and replication of data enabling simultaneous monitoring of multiple connection points from a single port
  • Maximum tool utilization extending 1Gbps monitoring tools to 10Gbps and 40Gbps networks to defer costly upgrades
  • Automated troubleshooting that reduces mean time to repair (MTTR)
  • Industry-first “drag and drop” interface that speeds and simplifies configuration and management

Related Products

Ixia's Net Tool Optimizer Net Optics Network Taps Net Optics Phantom Virtualization Tap Net Optics Network Packet Brokers Ixia's Application and Threat Intelligence Processor

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

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

Phantom Virtualization Tap
Passive network access to traffic passing between VMs

Net Optics Network Packet Brokers
Inline traffic aggregation,
filtering, deduplication and
load balancing for monitoring
tools

Ixia Application and Threat Intelligence Processor
Better data for better
decisions

Resources

The Real Secret to Securing your Network

Ixia's- The Real Secret to Securing your Network

Thanks to Ixia for the article.