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Networking News: IoT Risks + Network Monitoring in the Cloud Era

June 4, 2019

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In this day and age, the networking world is constantly changing with discovered risks and issues from new technology, monitoring and security measures in new cloud environments and many more. With so much note-worthy news, here are snippets from interesting and important stories and updates in the industry this month, and what it could mean for the industry as a whole.

The risk of having bad IoT data

As the use of internet of things (IoT) devices grows, the data they generate continues to worm its way into more various areas of personal and private life. Customers of an insurance company for example can save big on cost when a smart device installed in their cars can track their safe driving. With this, a big question arises as to who should take responsibility when things go wrong.  Read more to find out the potential problems that arises, and the strict need for government regulations to determine data resilience and reliability. 
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Network Monitoring in a Multi-cloud Era 

Traditional monitoring tools center around the health and performance of individual network elements. Today’s digital business era requires a more holistic view of networks with the ability to glean and correlate data from diverse cloud environments using big data analytics and machine learning. Most enterprises now use two or more cloud service providers, and 35% use up to 5 monitoring tools to keep tabs in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. What’s the best approach to full network visibility? Read more.

Study: Most Enterprise IoT transactions are unencrypted

The research by cloud-based security provider Zscaler found that about 91.5% of transactions by IoT devices took place over plaintext, while 8.5% were encrypted with SSL. Traffic can be intercepted by attackers and data can be altered. While IoT devices are common in enterprises, many of the devices are employee owned and this is just one of the reasons they are a security concern. Read on to know some of the preventive measures that you can take to avoid attacks on unencrypted IoT transactions.


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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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