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Network infrastructure design often focuses squarely on performance – and not without reason. After all, network performance is what ultimately makes you money.
But, what can cost you your job is failing to address network security issues that lead to costly data breaches.
While performance is certainly a top-level consideration, you can’t afford to design your network infrastructure without careful attention to your security system, which starts with your network visibility.
And network visibility, of course, begins and ends with the strategic use of network TAPs.
Where you position a TAP is largely dependent on your network design and security goals. For instance, if your greatest concern is thwarting hackers, you want to place a TAP outside of your firewall for subscriber and LAN/WAN monitoring, as well as QoS measurements and SLA verification.
In addition, you should place network TAPs inside your network and on the edge for increased protection. The former supports intrusion detection and prevention, while the latter gives you 100% visibility for next-gen firewall and bandwidth monitoring, data leakage prevention, and protocol and packet analysis.
A wise strategy, regardless of your goals, is to start by tapping outside of your network and work in. You need to create a security perimeter first and foremost. From there, design for internal visibility.
Many network security issues stem from internal problems, such as employees wrongfully or intentionally sending critical information out of your network. This is where DLP plays an important roll.
Noncompliance is becoming a greater cost of network security issues.You want to be able to monitor your compliance areas to have real-time visibility into anything transpiring in your compliance and audit perimeter. And the only way to ensure 100% network visibility is to utilize network TAPs when connecting your security devices.
Should you suffer a breach and lose data, records, or more, you must be able to prove to governing bodies exactly what it is you lost.
New legislation states that if you’re unable to prove limited loss of records – five records out of one million, for example – it’s to be assumed that you’ve lost all of them. This assessment directly affects how much you would be fined under these circumstances.
Including fines, PCI damages, a $14 million payment to MasterCard and a $67 million payment to Visa, Target’s network breach will ultimately cost the retail chain over $250 million. Small and medium-sized businesses simply can’t afford such a costly event.
As you move deeper inside your network and server farms, network TAPs play an important role in providing absolute insight for performance analysis, troubleshooting, and optimizing your network and application performance monitoring.
Installing network TAPs with multiple ports provides the flexibility you need to support any security or monitoring device your company wants to deploy; ensuring that your devices will see every bit, byte, and packet® of data.
If you want to learn more about security necessities, download our whitepaper, Managing the Edge of the Network.