In this month’s technology opinion leader column from Keysight Technologies, Keith Bromley shares his insights into how an EMA research report has amplified the importance of a network visibility architecture for the hybrid, multi-cloud enterprise.
Network Visibility Architecture for the Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Enterprise
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and continued threat of cyber-attacks has put the IT and security industry on high alert, resulting in many organisations having to push their network infrastructure into the cloud.
This adoption to support remote work has created challenges in seeing security threats and maintaining performance.
As a way to further explore the industry’s response to current visibility initiatives, EMA released a report which investigates how IT and security organisations use network visibility architectures to deliver network packets for critical performance and security, and suggests how organisations should evolve their network visibility architectures as they adopt hybrid, multi-cloud architectures.
Visibility architectures are essential for IT and network security personnel to be able to take a holistic look at an enterprise’s entire network, followed by a better understanding of what tools are available, where the network is accessed, and what data feeds into those tools.
Benefits and challenges
By implementing visibility solutions, IT teams can expose hidden problems and eliminate blind spots, improve efficiency, reduce costs and optimise troubleshooting efforts.
The EMA report findings further support these benefits, stating that organisations that use a network visibility architecture will improve IT and security productivity and reduce overall security risk.
About the Author: Keith Bromley is a senior solutions marketing manager at Keysight Technologies, with over 25 years of industry experience in marketing and engineering. Keith is responsible for marketing activities for Keysight’s network visibility and security solutions. As a spokesperson for the industry, Keith is a subject matter expert on network monitoring, network security, management systems, cloud computing, unified communications, IP telephony, SIP, wireless and wireline infrastructure.
25 percent of survey respondents said that using visibility solutions improved capacity management, while 22 per cent reported optimised cloud migration and 21.9% said it resulted in network and application performance and resiliency.
Other opportunities from using a visibility architecture include better cross-team collaboration, reduced compliance risk, and extended life of analysis tools.
As with any IT solutions, there are going to be challenges to adoption and implementation.
In the case of visibility architectures, organisations have stated that scalability and complexity (as well as insufficient budget, architectural complexity, and limited cloud visibility) are some of their top concerns.
In most cases, the benefits of visibility architecture end up outweighing any potential disadvantages.
The first task is to choose a solution that fits your enterprise needs.
Budget concerns are not to be taken lightly but the reality is there are ways to cut costs even when it comes to visibility architectures.
Many application and network performance and security tools are charged by their use.
Filtering out unnecessary traffic, deduplication and other smart filtering functions can bring that cost down and more than pay for the use of taps and packet brokers, while allowing for a more scalable, future-proof approach.
The architectural core: Network packet brokers
The gold standard in network visibility is the use of packet brokers.
The EMA report found that advanced features, such as packet filtering, manipulation, and metadata generation are the top characteristics of a network packet broker that are most important to earning a return on investment in the technology.
Secondary characteristics are listed as resilience/reliability with the tertiary priority noted as manageability and automation.
The report also validated the importance of packet brokers when it comes to cybersecurity, citing that the most valued packet manipulation or data generation feature in a packet broker is threat intelligence.
Supporting hybrid, multi-cloud visibility
The EMA report confirmed what we already know: packet data is essential to cloud operations, especially for security monitoring and analysis.
In fact, nearly 65 per cent of respondents say this data is important for security monitoring and analysis in the cloud.
Another standout statistic from the report is that 99 per cent of companies are making at least some attempt to collect packet data in the cloud and supply it to performance and security analysis tools.
The research from EMA has made it clear that network visibility architectures are essential to a company’s success.
By implementing the right solutions, organisations can be strategically positioned for exceptional network visibility with no traffic loss or dropped packets.
Tags: architecture, byline, commentary, infrastructure, interviews, Keysight, networks, opinion, Tech Focus, technology, visibility
These days, everyone’s into network visibility and observability. It’s a good thing!
Indeed. Goes hand in hand with Zero Trust.
🙂