Its solutions continuously evolve with the changing business needs
With the pandemic accelerating the digital transformation journey, remote connectivity became crucial. With remote working becoming the norm, cyber attackers reacted accordingly, leading to varied attacks targeting enterprise networks.
Vinay Sharma, Regional Director, India and SAARC, NETSCOUT
How is NETSCOUT SYSTEMS INC., supporting businesses to deal with the constantly evolving cyber threat landscape.
Enterprises are under constant attacks and the severity is only going to increase with bad actors leveraging new-age tools and technologies. According to IDC, 86 percent of boards of directors see cybersecurity as a top priority in 2022. Organizations require a way to integrate how they defend against both inbound and outbound attacks.
NETSCOUT Arbor Edge Defense (AED) addresses that need. By using stateless packet processing technology and armed with highly curated global threat intelligence, AED acts as a network perimeter enforcement point where it detects and blocks inbound cyberthreats and outbound malicious communication in bulk and acts as the first and last line of perimeter defense. It automatically blocks inbound DDoS attacks and other commodity cyber threats to maintain network or service availability and takes the pressure off downstream security devices like next-gen firewalls. It alerts security teams of compromised internal hosts and helps them to stop a data breach.
Arbor Cloud delivers an integrated, on-demand solution to both enterprises and service providers with comprehensive protection from modern, high-volume DDoS attacks that target bandwidth, ‘low and slow’ attacks targeting applications and infrastructure, and concurrent, multi-vector attacks.
NETSCOUT Threat Intelligence helps in the war against internet-scale threats by identifying and remediating threats with the Active Threat Level Analysis System (ATLAS).
Our world-class ATLAS Security and Engineering Research Team (ASERT) deeply research malware campaigns and botnets at a global level, providing much-needed context to the overall threat environment.
What is key to improving the customer experience for communication service providers?
All organizations in the service industry strive to deliver optimal customer experience. With the digitization of services, it is very crucial for IT teams to understand what is happening inside the network.
Having insights into device behaviors and their Quality of Service (QoS) experience, Communication Service Providers (CSPs) can ensure enterprise network performance that leads to optimal user experience. Data is key to knowing how the network works and providing the visibility required to identify problems and make prompt repairs. CSPs have a large database of servers, telemetry, history, and stream where data is accessible but flawed due to variable fidelity, vendor dependency, and infrastructure focus.
On the other hand, IP traffic or flow of data across the internet is a more reliable source that is high-fidelity, agnostic and service focussed. By transforming this data into smart data, it allows CSPs to obtain the visibility and level of information necessary to improve the customer experience.
CSPs can get a real-time overview of their network services, technologies, and subscribers. They are infused with user experience as they span all devices, network infrastructure, and applications consumed. Smart data is the key to improving customer experience by delivering the insights needed to ensure good network performance for CSPs.
Enterprise networks are becoming more complex and cyber-attacks are increasing exponentially. Explain how network visibility is crucial to addressing security challenges.
Visibility has always been crucial and is gaining further importance as the infrastructure is getting more complex and multifold. For instance, while there are business benefits brought about by Digital Transformation and Cloud adoption, they also come with a few challenges with loss of visibility and lack of control being the top two. When the applications are spread beyond the DC into CoLo, Cloud, or SaaS environment, there are several edges to the combined network. The IT team either has limited or no visibility into it. The team also has no direct control over these environments, with automation and orchestration topping up the existing challenges.
But for solving any business problem, we first require proper network visibility of the traffic flow. Network visibility solutions should evolve with changing business needs. It is important to have a solution in place, which maintains visibility across the entire chain irrespective of where they are hosted and accessed from.
How can the collaboration between IT and cybersecurity teams at the organization ensure the protection of resources from cyber-attacks?
Cybercrime has increased to unprecedented levels in the recent past. Bad actors are exploiting new vulnerabilities and disrupting VPN networks, firewalls, and cloud-based tools used by WFH employees. Operations can freeze leading to financial losses, customer churns, and brand damage. IT teams ensure an efficient experience for employees and customers and security teams are focussed on protecting assets and addressing security issues. Challenges are aggravated further when IT and cybersecurity teams do not collaborate effectively.
Only cross-silo collaboration between these two teams can quickly and effectively determine whether an IT service event is a performance issue or a security incident which is sorely needed in today’s organizations’ complex digital infrastructure.
With this collaboration, organizations can improve network performance, reduce security risk and accelerate security incident detection and response.
Cyber-resiliency has evolved from being an IT Security initiative to a key business strategy. Explain.
With the pandemic accelerating the digital transformation journey, remote connectivity became crucial. With remote working becoming the norm, cyber attackers reacted accordingly, leading to varied attacks targeting enterprise networks. Triple extortion attacks are being used to increase the odds of the extortion payment. This consists of encryption data with ransomware and demanding payment for a decryption key and stealing data with the threat to expose or sell publicly unless payment is received. The attacker launches a DDoS attack to prove the seriousness of the threat, block communication to internal network resources and overwhelm security teams.
Attacks have extended to devices used by organizations to support remote work initiatives. In addition to the increase in overall attacks, there is a rise in secondary and tertiary attacks as well.
These changes to the attack vectors are driving enterprises to rethink their approach to cyber-resiliency which is the ability to predict, resist, recover from and adapt to massive changes in cyberattacks. Prior to the pandemic, the cyber resiliency plan was more of a security initiative but now with the changes in enterprises, IT, and security, it has evolved into a business strategy.
Cyber resiliency improves a company’s ability to identify and measure risk, while also improving visibility for both IT and Security teams with the responsibility of protecting resources. Organizations should look for scalable solutions that use curated threat intelligence data to identify potential threats to incorporate cyber resiliency as a business strategy.
In today’s remote and hybrid work culture, what are the new challenges faced by ITOps teams? How is NETSCOUT helping organizations address them?
Yes, the hybrid mix of remote and onsite work has become the new normal. ITOps team has the responsibility of delivering a good end-user experience in a hybrid work model by ensuring collaborative tools and business applications deliver a superior end-user experience. This model relies heavily on UC&C and collaboration systems with the majority of employees using video conferencing for remote work. With corporate infrastructures becoming more complex, relying on multiple vendors to deliver vital services, both to home and office workspaces is common. ITOps teams face the challenge of being able to identify and resolve problems at the earliest. With SaaS, UCaaS, and data center-based services operating at the edge, they are under pressure to assure the end-user experience.
For this, they require operating comprehensible visibility at the edge and integrated analysis throughout the transaction ecosystem.
With so many edges, in today’s IT environments, there are gaps in visibility making it a challenge to determine whether the problems are occurring at the client edge, network edge, data center, or cloud edge.
Traffic problems at these edges can result in delayed logins, slow responsiveness, and even outages with key business applications, negatively impacting employee productivity and customer service.
With limited visibility across so many edges, the ITOps team requires vendor-agnostic tools that can quickly identify the source of issues.
NETSCOUT’s Smart Edge Monitoring is a new, patent-pending architecture that provides complete visibility and insights for IT teams to assure the highest quality employee digital experience for any network or application regardless of where users perform their jobs.
Early detection and rapid resolution of such problems reduce employees’ frustration and lost productivity and may even avoid broader-scale outages.
Can you elaborate on your market approach?
At NETSCOUT, we work only with Channel Partners to reach out and cater to the market, globally. We believe Channel Partners are crucial for the organization’s success. India is a Channel-friendly market and we continue to invest in this area.
We focus on selecting the right Partners with relevant skill sets in the respective industry vertical and will continue to support them and help them to strengthen their capabilities.
We ensure our Partners have a complete understanding of our technology and capabilities as we together serve customers with appropriate solutions. We look forward to increasing our engagement with the Channel engine so it is further strengthened leading to better business outcomes.
What kind of interest have you observed from the region for your offerings?
India is a mature market and market trends especially in cyber security are very similar to other developed markets like the US and Europe. Customers are increasingly interested in the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of their data and services. The government and regulatory authorities are also playing important roles in educating and spreading awareness about cyber security threats.
We see the increasing demand for anti-DDOS requirements at all companies in the financial sector, government and PSUs, and even other large enterprises. Customers are also taking a keen interest in solutions providing network-wide visibility in their multi-cloud hybrid infrastructure, detecting threats, and quickly responding to any incident or breach.
