Does your organization have total control of the traffic flows within your network? Are you familiar with the term “network visibility”? If you’re not sure how secure your network is, your company most likely is susceptible to blind spots that can lead to undetected attacks. Until you have total visibility of the traffic and data flows within your network, daily operations and sensitive data will be at risk. Your overall cybersecurity approach starts with visibility into every facet of the network.
Especially as you scale your network to meet its users’ demands, you can become increasingly vulnerable to attacks. Threats can occur anywhere, and your network security team should have a proactive approach to handle this genuine danger. These issues can be hard to detect because hackers can manipulate the applications and devices within a network’s infrastructure as a cover-up. Organizations need an action plan to prepare your company for threats and increase your network visibility to detect typical low-and-slow attacks.
Identifying Network Threats
Modern organizations have devices connecting on and off the network circumventing traditional security screenings. Hackers can use these 3rd party devices to gain entry to a network. Mobile device loopholes are the most common way that hackers can target a network.
Lack of network visibility doesn’t often raise concerns until users experience slowed applications, security breaches, and reduced productivity. Even network printers, storage, and other smart devices can be susceptible to infiltration. In reality, most organizational leadership have no clue about the traffic on their network. Network security teams have a unique responsibility to know who is on the network, how they access files and data, and when they do this, as well as typical application workflows.
As the number of devices in your network grows, network infrastructure teams will need to provide more bandwidth. The only solution is to increase that bandwidth as soon as possible to avoid productivity loss. Networks must be ready to scale on short notice. Organizations need to be prepared to act if network bottlenecks are causing communication outages.
Typical network users won’t know there’s an issue until they cannot access data or get an inclination that they may have been hacked. If users are experiencing these types of issues, there is most likely a need to bolster network visibility. If your network security team has poor control over the network flow, they will not detect an issue until users point them out. Organizations should take a proactive approach to optimizing their network visibility solution.
Expanding Network Visibility
Legacy network threat identification solutions did not require analysis of 100% of the network traffic. Network packet sampling reduced the required traffic analysis. This type of monitoring consists of taking sampled flow data and ignoring the majority of the network traffic. This common approach was considered acceptable due to the high cost of monitoring 100% of the traffic although it was understood that cyber threats could go undetected.
To have complete transparency of what goes in your network, you need to maximize visibility. Cyber security engineers can optimize network visibility through analyzing unsampled flow metadata.
Visibility Solution Based on Unsampled Flow Metadata
The most efficient solution is to generate flow metadata from 100% of the network packets from congested traffic links. A comprehensive unsampled flow monitoring system is ideal for combating limited network visibility, regardless of network size. Flow-based visibility solutions do not have the constraints that traditional packet-based solutions do. But they can be scaled at a fraction of the cost when compared solutions reliant on analyzing full packets.
Choosing the Optimal Visibility Solution
The most efficient organizations target 100% network visibility via a scalable and cost-effective solution. While networks face evolving traffic profiles, the monitoring infrastructure must adapt without constant updates to the physical equipment. Organizations must consider how its monitoring infrastructure will scale so that it can adjust to evolving bandwidth requirements.
You should match increased usage with a system that can scale at the same level. The rate at which the traffic on your network rises should match the capability of your network visibility solution. Ideally, traffic rates should never outgrow your monitoring capabilities. Full-fidelity unsampled network flow metadata, as generated by NetQuest’s OMX3200 IPFIX Flow Sensor, is a popular way to handle this. The OMX is a multi-terabit traffic probe supporting unsampled IPFIX metadata generation and advanced packet processing. The OMX3200 can process 100G/10G Ethernet, OTN and SONET/SDH networks in a modular 1RU hardware platform.
Scaling Visibility
Various industries benefit the most from compact but powerful network visibility monitoring systems. Government agencies and network security teams require 100% visibility of traffic flows to detect network threats and prevent cyber attacks. There is no wiggle room for slip-ups when your network data is confidential, and risks are elevated if the information is leaked. It is also critical that there are no lapses in your service monitoring system. Joint solutions like NetQuest-Elastiflow analyze the real-time traffic from large regional backbone networks along with cloud uplinks so that command, control messaging, and callbacks are detected (even simultaneously) from a variety of infected vectors.
If your network monitoring solution only samples network traffic, there will never be a complete understanding of your entire network and attacks will go undetected. Large networks need all traffic flows monitored to make it easier for analytical tools to detect anomalous network behaviors. As networks transition from 10G to 100G, visibility solutions that can evolve to handle either condition is a major advantage for infrastructure planning. Spotting bad actors early is critical to the security of your organization’s data. NetQuest and ElastiFlow have developed a joint solution that scales to provide such detection using a broader network visibility lens for analyzing behavioral patterns across a wide range of endpoint variables.
Selecting Your Network Visibility Tool
The integration of network visibility tools like the NetQuest OMX3200 Flow Sensor enables organizations to scale their network security solution with rising traffic rates without compromising visibility. The flexibility of a dedicated flow sensor allows security teams to generate standard unsampled IPFIX flow metadata from 100G/10G Ethernet, OTN and SONET/SDH networks for 100% visibility to optimize government defense and enterprise/telco security applications.