As the “modern” network continues to grow in size and complexity, the change presents new challenges in network management. One of the most prevalent issues you face today is network visibility.
More and more of your users are connecting remotely with multiple mobile devices – while consuming more data from a greater number of sources. It’s likely that many of these applications are hosted virtually, and your users expect to have immediate access at all times.
Without proper planning and network design, pacifying the needs of your users comes at the cost of your network’s security. The growth (and ensuing complexity) often obstructs your network visibility with "blind spots" that make complete and accurate data capture impossible. These blind spots create windows of opportunity for hackers. Flawed intrusion detection and prevention is a cost you and your clients can’t afford to pay.
What Causes a Lack of End-To-End Visibility?
There are many ways in which network visibility becomes comprised. Perhaps duplicate packets are overwhelming your SPAN ports, limiting the ability of your applications to monitor and protect your network. In a similar vein, you might not be leveraging network TAPs to safeguard against oversubscription and loss of data access. Plus, network monitoring tools often fail to keep pace with upgrades you make to your infrastructure.
Unfortunately, many businesses fail to comprehend the risk and consequences of changes they make to their network. It’s not until a crisis happens that the visibility issues are recognized.
An Investment in Switches
To maintain complete network visibility, many of the world’s largest data centers are beginning to invest in network monitoring switches, including those in investment banking. What is a switch exactly?
A monitoring switch is an intelligent device that connects your monitoring tools to your data center. As with any network, filtering and load balancing is critical to getting all data to the right place while keeping the network running smoothly. A network monitoring switch delivers such data between your tools and data center for complete and proper analysis.
The advent of switches has improved the productivity of data centers, increasing the efficiency of data capture and the effectiveness of your range of applications. Switches also provide intuitive management interfaces that empower you to drag and drop traffic flows to tools without command line interface (CLI) scripting. In all, a switch provides the short-term benefits of complete network visibility as well as the long-term benefits of adaptability to increasing network speeds.
Want to learn about the different types of network tools and applications that help safeguard your data? Download your complimentary copy of What Your Network’s Missing: 7 Tools to TAP.