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...

Unlike traditional, reactive approaches to detection, hunting is proactive. With hunting, security professionals don't wait to take action until they've received a security alert or, even worse, suffer a data breach. Instead, hunting entails looking for opponents who are already in your environment. Hunting leads to discovering undesirable activity...

 Advanced cyber threats, cloud computing, and exploding traffic volume pose significant challenges if you are responsible for your organization's network security and performance management. The concept of 'network visibility' is frequently introduced as the key to improvement. But what exactly is network visibility and how does it help an org...

It has finally happened: thanks to advances in encryption, legacy security and monitoring tools are now useless when it comes to SSL. Read this white paper from Ixia, to learn how this negatively impacts visibility into network applications, such as e-mail, e-commerce, online banking, and data storage. Or even worse, how advanced malware ...

 Viavi Solutions today released the results of its 10th annual State of the Network global study, which focuses on the growing issue of security threats. Now available for download, respondents included 1,035 CIOs, IT directors, and network engineers. "Enterprise network teams are expending more time and resources than ever before to battle se...

Cloud computing has become the de facto foundation for digital business. As more and more enterprises move critical workloads to private and public clouds, they will face new challenges ensuring security, reliability, and performance of these workloads. If you are responsible for IT security, data center operations, or application performance, make...

Tenth Annual "State of the Network" Global Survey from Viavi Reveals Network and Security Trends from over 1,000 Network Professionals  In April 2017, Viavi Solutions (NASDAQ: VIAV) released the results of its tenth annual State of the Network global study today. This year's study focused on security threats, perhaps explaining why it gar...

 It is really next to impossible to avoid hearing about how "The Cloud" is transforming business everywhere. Well-known technology companies from the old guard like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and Adobe, to established tech powerhouses Google and Amazon, to pretty much every new hot startup like Cloudera are all promoting how they are using the cl...

The increasing density, complexity and expanse of modern networking environments have fueled the ongoing debate around which network analysis and monitoring tools serve the needs of the modern engineer best - placing Packet Capture and NetFlow Analysis at center-stage of the conversation. Granted, both can be extremely valuable tools in ongoing efforts to maintain and optimize complex environments, but as an engineer, I tend to focus on solutions that give me the insights I need without too much...

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...

According an article in techtarget.com "Your routers and switches can yield a mother lode of information about your network--if you know where to dig." The article goes on to say that excavating and searching through endless traffic data and logs manufactured by your network system is a lot like mining for gold, and punching random holes to look for a few nuggets of information isn't very efficient. Your search will be much more fruitful if you know where to look and what it will look like. Fort...

Once upon a time, all you needed was a firewall to call yourself “secure.” But then, things changed. More networks are created every day, every network is visible to the others, and they connect with each other all the time—no matter how far away or how unrelated. And malicious threats have taken notice . . . As the Internet got bigger, anonymity got smaller. It’s impossible to go “unnoticed” on the Internet now. Everybody is a target. Into today’s network landscape, every network is under the t...

We’ve been doing a lot of blogging around here lately about NCCM and the importance of having an automated configuration and change management system. We’ve even published a Best practices guide for NCCM. One of the main points in any NCCM system is having consistent and accurate configuration backups of all of your “key” devices. When I ask Network Managers to name their key devices, they generally start with WAN / Internet routers and Firewalls. This makes sense of course because, in a modern ...

Network performance management is something that virtually every business needs, but not something that every business is actively doing, or even aware of. And why should they? While understanding the technical side of things is best left to the IT department, understanding the benefits of a properly managed network is something that will help get the business managers on board, especially when good performance management solutions might be a cost that hadn't been considered. So what are the ben...

The networks that your business operates on are often open and complex. Your IT department is responsible for mitigating network risks, managing performance and auditing data to ensure functionality. Using NetFlow forensics can help your IT team maintain the competitiveness and reliability of the systems required to run your business. In IT, network security forensics involves the monitoring and analysis of your network's traffic to gather information, obtain legal evidence and detect network in...

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...

I’ve been working in the Network Management business for over 20 years, and in that time I have certainly seen my share of networks. Big and small, centralized and distributed, brand name vendor devices in shiny datacenters, and no-name brands in basements and bunkers. The one consistent surprise I continue to encounter is how many of these organization (even the shiny datacenter ones) lack a backup system for their network device configurations. I find that a little amazing, since I also can’t ...

CIO Review 20 Most Promising Networking Solution Providers Virtualization has become the life blood of the networking industry today. With the advent of technologies such as software-defined networking and network function virtualization, the black box paradigm or the legacy networking model has been shattered. In the past, the industry witnessed networking technology such as Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), which eventually gave way to Ethernet, the predominant network of choice. This p...

So far, we have explored what NCCM is, and taken a deep dive into device policy checking – in this post we are going to be exploring Real Time Configuration Change Detection (or just Change Detection as I will call it in this blog). Change Detection is the process by which your NCCM system is notified - either directly by the device or from a 3rd party system that a configuration change has been made on that device. Why is this important? Let’s identify 3 main reasons that Change Detection is a ...

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...