Detection, Prevention vs Response and Root Cause
Today, most large organizations are fully invested in the network tools necessary to PREVENT and DETECT many, if not most, security and network related application performance problems. However, despite the abundance of tools organizations are struggling with effective problem remediation and network forensics due to a lack of any real historical network visibility. In our view, this absence of real time and historical network visibility is an issue that every large organization will need to tackle going forwards if they are to effectively manage their corporate reputations, control their operational costs and extract the full value from their IT investments.
Over the last five years the adoption of efficiency-enhancing / cost saving technologies such as VDI, unified communications, server virtualization, high-speed networking and cloud services has had a profound impact on corporate networks and the operational teams responsible for managing and securing them. Whereas once diagnosing and troubleshooting problems was a fairly straightforward affair, it has now become a complex and highly time-sensitive activity that is made all the more challenging by the fact that most of the DETECTION tools in use today are fundamentally unable to cope with the throughput demands of real 10Gbps environments.
For the largest organizations the cost of impaired network performance and/or unplanned downtime is measured in millions of dollars per hour, which makes rapid incident RESPONSE and ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS a business imperative. Yet despite this fact, most organizations are significantly under-invested in the visibility infrastructure necessary to provide engineers and analysts with the information that they need to pinpoint the root cause of issues and respond effectively to network, application and security problems.
Recognizing symptoms but treating causes
Based on more than ten years of experience working with some of the largest organizations in the world, the most obvious symptoms of poor network visibility can include:
- Long and costly delays in network/application/security incident response
- An inability to contain and manage performance problems and breaches
- Escalating network management costs
- Growing number of 'zombie' trouble tickets (tickets that refuse to die)
- Long-term service degradation
- Unplanned network downtime
- Slow deployment times-to-value for network related technology investments
- Poor ROI on network-related IT investments
If your organization is experiencing these symptoms, then there's a good chance that a lack of real time and historical network visibility is at least one of the possible causes.
Creating real business value
The ability to visualize, search, and retrieve historical packets from anywhere across a high-speed network enables organizations to:
- Drive down both their time to resolution on all kinds of network problems, which makes operational teams more effective
- Establish the true root cause of network problems, which allows them to drive future incident prevention
- Develop meaningful network security containment plans and strategies which are vital in the event of a security breach
- Monitor key network performance metrics in real time so that issues can be addressed before they become service affecting.
- Unlock latent network potential through improved network configuration and utilization
If your network is mission critical and you need to respond more quickly and more efficiently to every kind of network event, regardless of how it was identified, then you need 100% network visibility from Endace.
Network visibility for the cloud generation
To cope with the demands of the cloud generation organizations need to adopt a fundamentally different approach to network visibility. To become truly responsive and address the issues identified organizations need to pro-actively capture and record their network traffic in order that they can use network history to respond to network and security issues quickly AND efficiently, safe in the knowledge that they've got all of the information that they need.
Our approach to network visibility is the product of more than ten years of extensive research and development. Our hardware based, application aware visibility solutions are based on our proprietary DAG technology and are proven even under the most extreme tests to provide 100% accurate visibility into network traffic. They are capable of capturing, indexing and recording every packet - regardless of packet size - at 10 Gbps, 40G and 100G, and are trusted by organizations across almost every industry vertical to help solve a wide range of problems from time-to-resolution to compliance management.
