As networks rapidly expand and cyber threats continue to evolve, Enterprises have increased the emphasis on network visibility with more and more organizations realizing the need for appropriate solutions to prevent security failures and translate network insight into clear business value and derive superior ROI
Q: How has network visibility grown in significance in today’s enterprise infrastructure?
A: Most enterprises today are struggling with network blind spots caused by increase in encrypted traffic on their networks and migrations to public and private cloud environments. They also need to get better visibility across their rapidly-expanding network estates to address performance issues and mitigate threats. The reality is that security and analytics tools are only as good as the data they are seeing. The only way to truly address these common and widespread challenges is with a strong visibility architecture.
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“Organization’s operations are dependent on an environment with a huge visibility gap, and they are now realizing that this has to change to keep their data secure.”
Brendan Leitch
Head of Marketing
Asia Pacific
Ixia
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Q: What are the factors driving growth and innovation in the technology? What are some of the global trends around network visibility?
A: Throughout 2017, we will see an increased emphasis on network visibility, and by 2018 approximately 60 percent of the enterprises implementing the appropriate network visibility will experience fewer security failures. Organizations are moving to a cloud-based environment and they must prepare for the security and control risks associated with the cloud. Organization’s operations are dependent on an environment with a huge visibility gap, and they are now realizing that this has to change to keep their data secure.
Q: What is the current market size of visibility solutions in India? Where does the Indian demographic stand compared to global market?
A: The market forecast for the NVM sector has been scaled back to reflect a more specific cross-section of the market, representative of industry consolidation, network virtualization and the growth of substitute functionality from networking vendors. Globally, we now anticipate it to grow to over $1.6bn by 2019. India should rank amongst top 10 markets in terms of consumption of such technology. We have a fairly developed financial sector, telecom players and more data centers – upcoming and in place. Within Asia we are expecting India to be our top 3 markets.
Q: Enterprise network visibility is quickly becoming a top concern for CIOs. What factors are influencing this change in IT strategy?
A: Enterprises have specific needs to secure and manage the nervous system of their IT infrastructure —which is their network. Network visibility helps ensure application performance because most applications are highly dependent on the network. Compliance, auditing, and security requirements demand visibility into how IT resources interoperate, and network visibility is required to gain insights into how well they are functioning. If IT organizations do not have complete network visibility, resulting blind spots may lead to missing critical security threats and availability or performance anomalies. The use cases that require complete visibility include the introduction of BYOD devices, unknown network devices, and integration with a multitude of security tools. In all cases, missing a complete view of the network can lead to mistakes in critical IT and business decision making, leaving the enterprise open to security vulnerabilities, as well as poor application and network performance that could be detrimental to revenue generation or even cause reputational damage stemming from security breaches. ESG research has shown that network security and performance are among the critical challenges reported by IT decision makers today. By implementing solutions offering modern network visibility, IT organizations can translate network insight into clear business value and derive superior ROI from these solutions.
Q: How has cloud changed the approach to network visibility for enterprises?
A: Organizations in every market sector, even those not typically associated with technology, are migrating to the public cloud. This trend is growing because of the increased flexibility and agility the cloud offers. Whether these applications are web servers or critical business apps, they must ensure the same level of performance, security, and compliance available in their traditional data centers. In a traditional datacenter, these needs are met with robust tools in combination with a zero-packet-loss, application-aware visibility network. In the public cloud, access to packet data is limited, but needs for visibility remain—including the need to see active threats, monitor applications, and diagnose problems. Every CIO/CTO have cloud on their top 5 agenda and so is security. Now, for any public, private or hybrid cloud deployment to be successful the IT leaders want full access and control on the means of security. Ixia’s CloudLens Public helps proving such visibility on private cloud. We integrate with the likes of AWS etc to help clients provide monitoring solutions on public cloud.
Q: What are the major sectors where you see big opportunity network visibility technologies? How crucial is network visibility in Government projects like smart cities?
A: Government organizations, telecom companies, and financial institutions are the key verticals adopting network visibility. It’s no secret that government networks are among the most targeted. The stakes are high, and attackers know they must use more evasive tactics to penetrate these networks. Attacks on government networks can lead to tremendous loss, whether of strategic, political, monetary or intelligence value.Attacks on telecommunication operator’s network could also scale up to other networks through the interconnection interfaces. The intruders can, therefore, gain access to their targets irrespective of the geographical location. They use highly sophisticated arsenals, not leading to physical destruction, but stealing organizational and personal sensitive information for financial benefits, competitive advantage, and state-sponsored attacks.
Networks are becoming complex with IoT being embedded across all city functions in a smart city. To tackle that, there is a need to intelligently route traffic and use underutilized network resources. Visibility and control over the network has become critical. Network infrastructures need to embrace open source software-defined networking (SDN) components to be able to support the highly mobilized and virtualized environments faced by smart cities. Having more network control via open SDN will allow developers to innovate independent of hardware and software. The ability to build new products or services has increased dramatically. By keeping SDN open, the challenges faced in building a smart city can be collectively overcome from a larger R&D effort.
Q: What should a CIO look for when procuring new network visibility solutions? Where do Ixia’s offerings slot in the scheme of things?
A: While procuring new network visibility solutions, CIO’s must have a clear understanding of the key gaps in information security capabilities. It is equally important to make sure the intended product & solutions will meet the business objectives. Visibility is achieved through a blend of people, process and technology. Many times the solution that is obtained has numerous dependencies in order to be effective. The visibility solution may require a specialized skill set or significant integration work before there is noticeable value derived from the purchase.
Ixia offers the most expansive visibility product portfolio available that ensures the right data gets to the right tool at the right time, creates fail-safe inline security tool deployments and validates active SLA and customer experience monitoring.
