Maximizing the Value and Resiliency of Your Deployed Enterprise Security Solution with Intelligent Load Balancing Correctly implementing your security solution in the presence of complex, high-volume user traffic has always been a difficult challenge for network architects. The data in transit on your network originates from many places and fluctuates with respect to data rates, complexity, and the occurrence of malicious events. Internal users create vastly different network traffic than extern...

Planning for the Future As we approach the New Year, many organizations’ data centers and network configurations are in lockdown mode. Whether this is due to assuming a defensive posture against the onslaught of holiday ecommerce traffic, or an accommodation to vacationing staff, the situation provides network managers an opportunity to perform a year-end network monitoring assessment Establish Future Goals, Identify Current Weaknesses and Make Sure Core Tasks and Goals Are Achieved   Q. Ho...

Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) announced yesterday that CAD50 million (USD41 million) of government funding has been allocated to a project to deploy a backbone satellite network supporting higher-speed internet for all 25 communities across Nunavut, the far northern region governed by indigenous peoples. The funding – p...

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has imposed interim rates for 'disaggregated' wholesale high speed access services in Ontario and Quebec, applicable to the two provinces' largest copper/fibre access network operator Bell Canada, as well as the three largest cablecos in Ontario/Quebec – Rogers, Videotron and Co...

2014 saw the creation of more than 317 million new pieces of malware. That means an average of nearly one million new threats were released each day. Here at Ixia we’ve been collecting and organizing threat intelligence data for years to help test the industry’s top network security products. Our Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) research center maintains one of the most comprehensive lists of malware, botnets, and network incursions for exactly this purpose. We’ve had many requests to l...

As we all know, technology has a life cycle of birth, early adoption, mainstream, and then obsoletion. Even the average consumer is very in touch with this lifecycle. However, within this overarching lifecycle there are “mini” lifecycles. One of these mini lifecycles that is particularly important to enterprises is the network design and equipment deployment lifecycle. This lifecycle is the basic roadmap of how equipment gets deployed within a company data network and key a topic of concern for ...

Ixia, an international leader in application performance and security resilience technology, conducted a survey to better understand how network security resilience solutions and techniques are used within the modern enterprise. While information exists on security products and threats, very little is available on how it is actually being used and the techniques and technology to ensure that security is completely integrated into the corporate network structure. This report presents the research...

Ixia recently added passive SSL decryption to the ATI Processor (ATIP). ATIP is an optional module in several of our Net Tool Optimizer (NTO) packet brokers that delivers application-level insight into your network with details such as application ID, user location, and handset and browser type. ATIP gives you this information via an intuitive real-time dashboard, filtered application forwarding, and rich NetFlow/IPFIX. Adding SSL decryption to ATIP was a logical enhancement, given the increasin...

These days, your network is as important to your business as any other item—including your products. Whether your customers are internal or external, you need a dependable and secure network that grows with your business. Without one, you are dead in the water. IT managers have a nearly impossible job. They must understand, manage, and secure the network all the time against all problems. Anything less than a 100 percent working network is a failure. There is a very familiar saying: Don’t miss t...

The working definition of a Network Operations Center (NOC) varies with each customer we talk with; however, the one point which remains unified is that the NOC should be the main point of visibility for key functions that combine to provide business services. The level at which a NOC ‘product’ is interactive depends on individual customer goals and requirements. Major equipment vendors trying to increase revenue are delving into management and visibility solutions with acquisitions and mergers,...

The Growing Impact of Social Networking Trends on Lawful Interception Lawful Interception (LI) is the legal process by which a communications network operator or Service Provider (SP) gives authorized officials access to the communications of individuals or organizations. With security threats mushrooming in new directions, LI is more than ever a priority and major focus of Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs). Regulations such as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), mandate...

One of the major issues that IT organizations have with any form of external cloud computing is that they don’t have much visibility into what is occurring within any of those environments. To help address that specific issue, Ixia created its Net Tool Optimizer, which makes use of virtual and physical taps to provide visibility into cloud computing environments. Now via the latest upgrade to that software, Ixia is providing support for both virtual and physical networks while doubling the numbe...

Blind spots are a long-established threat to virtual data centers. They are inherent to virtual machine (VM) usage and technology due to the nature of VMs, lack of visibility for inter- and intra-VM data monitoring, the typical practices around the use of VM’s, and the use of multiple hypervisors in enterprise environments. Virtual machines by their nature hide inter- and intra-VM traffic. This is because the traffic stays within in a very small geographic area. As I mentioned in a previous blog...

Delivers industry’s first visibility solution that includes stateful SSL decryption to improve application performance and security forensics Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA), a leading provider of application performance and security resilience solutions, announced it has extended its Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) Processor™ to include stateful, bi-directional SSL decryption capability for application monitoring and security analytics tools. Stateful SSL decryption provides complete session info...

Visibility. Network visibility. Simple terms that are thrown around quite a bit today. But the reality isn’t quite so simple. Why? Scale for one. It’s simple to maintain visibility for a small network. But large corporate or enterprise networks? That’s another story altogether. Visibility solutions for these large networks have to scale from one end of the network to the other end – from the campus and branch office edge to the data center and/or private cloud. Managing and troubleshooting perfo...

Ixia is proud to announce that we are expanding one of the key capabilities in Ixia xStream platforms, “Double Your Ports,” to our Net Tool Optimizers (NTO) family of products. As of our 4.3 release, this capability to double the number of network and monitor inputs is now available on the NTO platform. If you are not familiar with Double Your Ports, it is a feature that allows you to add additional network or tool ports to your existing NTO by allowing different devices to share a single port. ...

Proper access is the core component of any visibility architecture—you need to be able to capture the data before you can properly analyze it. To further help our customers, Ixia has released a new regenerator tap for copper networks. Regeneration means you get the same clean copy of incoming data distributed to multiple output ports in real time. The Ixia Net Optics Regeneration Taps solve the key physical layer challenges of multi-device monitoring for 10, 100, and 1000MB (1 GbE) copper networ...

In the three previous blogs in this series, I answered an often asked customer question – “What can really be done to improve network visibility?” – with discussions on data and packet conditioning, advanced filtering, and automated data center capability. In the fourth part of this blog series, I’ll reveal another set of features that can further improve network visibility and deliver even more verifiable benefits. Too quickly summarize, this multi-part blog covers an in-depth view of various f...

Imagine what would happen if the governor of one state got to change all the laws for the whole country for a day, without the other states or territories ever knowing about it. And then the next day, another governor gets to do the same. And then another. Such foreseeable chaos is precisely what happens when multiple IT or security administrators define traffic filtering policies without some overarching intelligence keeping tabs on who’s doing what. Each user acts from their own unique perspec...

An important factor in improving network visibility is the ability to pass the correct data to monitoring tools. Otherwise, it becomes very expensive and aggravating for most enterprises to sift through the enormous amounts of data packets being transmitted (now and in the near future). Bandwidth requirements are projected to continue increasing for the foreseeable future – so you may want to prepare now. As your bandwidth needs increase, complexity increases due to more equipment being added to...