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Network Visibility in Public Cloud Environments

July 2, 2019

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By now everyone is aware of the importance of visibility into their production network. Without network visibility, it’s impossible to have a true understanding of what’s going on in your network, optimize your security and monitoring tools, and protect your network against threats. But as companies start to move data and thus processing from traditional on-premise data centers to the cloud, it becomes difficult to ensure you continue to achieve the same levels of visibility in the cloud.


Before exploring how to achieve network visibility in the cloud, I wanted to start by reviewing network connectivity best practices for traditional data centers, because we will take those same principles and apply them to the cloud.

 

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Every good visibility platform needs to start with network TAPs. They are the foundation of a good network visibility fabric, ensuring that you’re going to get accurate data and reports from your tools.  

Once you’ve established a base of Network TAPs, you’ll likely want to add in an aggregation layer to maximize the efficiency of your existing infrastructure or minimize the need to purchase additional network packet brokers, by aggregating traffic streams to maximize the ports in your infrastructure.

Network Connectivity: Visibility in the Public Cloud

When it came down to figuring out how to provide the same level of network visibility into the cloud, we knew we had to deliver a best-of-breed solution to our customers, who rely on Garland Technology’s standards and dedication to quality every day.  That’s why we've released Garland Prisms to provide visibility into the public cloud.

Garland Prisms is the best-of-breed software that allows you to acquire, process, and distribute public cloud packet traffic to your security and monitoring tools. So similar to using physical layer TAPs in a traditional data center, in the public cloud, you’ll use Prisms to mirror packet traffic from dynamic resources such as VMs containers, and serverless resources, and send that traffic to storage or monitoring tools. 

 

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Heartbeats Packets Inside the Bypass TAP

If the inline security tool goes off-line, the TAP will bypass the tool and automatically keep the link flowing. The Bypass TAP does this by sending heartbeat packets to the inline security tool. As long as the inline security tool is on-line, the heartbeat packets will be returned to the TAP, and the link traffic will continue to flow through the inline security tool.

If the heartbeat packets are not returned to the TAP (indicating that the inline security tool has gone off-line), the TAP will automatically 'bypass' the inline security tool and keep the link traffic flowing. The TAP also removes the heartbeat packets before sending the network traffic back onto the critical link.

While the TAP is in bypass mode, it continues to send heartbeat packets out to the inline security tool so that once the tool is back on-line, it will begin returning the heartbeat packets back to the TAP indicating that the tool is ready to go back to work. The TAP will then direct the network traffic back through the inline security tool along with the heartbeat packets placing the tool back inline.

Some of you may have noticed a flaw in the logic behind this solution!  You say, “What if the TAP should fail because it is also in-line? Then the link will also fail!” The TAP would now be considered a point of failure. That is a good catch – but in our blog on Bypass vs. Failsafe, I explained that if a TAP were to fail or lose power, it must provide failsafe protection to the link it is attached to. So our network TAP will go into Failsafe mode keeping the link flowing.

Glossary

  1. Single point of failure: a risk to an IT network if one part of the system brings down a larger part of the entire system.

  2. Heartbeat packet: a soft detection technology that monitors the health of inline appliances. Read the heartbeat packet blog here.

  3. Critical link: the connection between two or more network devices or appliances that if the connection fails then the network is disrupted.

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