Managing dynamic environments: scaling security and visibility

NEVER BEFORE has networking and network visibility gone through more interesting times. The old approach to network visibility was simple – as the network grew, adding network management tools, application performance management tools, and security appliances, was a simple and effective strategy for managing the infrastructure. But no longer is it quite so simple.

The old approach of adding more tools and security appliances has become too cumbersome and costly. Networks have grown faster, and in many ways have exceeded the capabilities of the tools to monitor them, and appliances to secure them.

As a result, network blind spots and dark corners where the unknown occurs have emerged, creating a gaping visibility gap. This gap is evident within any modern network environment – after all, tools can only scale so much, and security appliances can only be dropped into so many network segments before options begin to run out.

It is a problem that keeps data centre managers, security administrators and network architects up at night – how do you secure what you can’t see? And how can security investments be made so they are efficient, strategic, and scalable?
That’s where a Visibility Fabric comes into play. For today’s next-generation networks, the secret to maintaining high performance and security lies in how a Visibility Fabric connects and illuminates network traffic. It fills the gap between network sprawl and the tools that manage and secure the network.

With a Visibility Fabric in place, fewer tools and appliances can do the job more efficiently and effectively because the Visibility Fabric does the heavy lifting by performing packet aggregation and filtering the right traffic to the right tool.

The Visibility Fabric modifies and transforms packets to optimise tool functionality and security capability. As threats increase and become more sophisticated, and as network architectures evolve with Software Defined Networking (SDN) and virtualisation, the need for visibility increases.

To help solve this challenge, visibility nodes can be strategically deployed among virtual, edge and core locations. With the right software powering these nodes, and creating the Visibility Fabric, centralised end-to-end sessions, flow and packet manipulation are made possible.

However, as neither the data centre environment, nor security threats are static, the various IT applications and appliances on the network that receive traffic from the Visibility Fabric require the same agility, and a way to dynamically respond to the events they detect without requiring administrative intervention. For example, if a security appliance detects a threat pattern, it should have the capability to auto-adjust traffic to react and respond to threats. This is Software Defined Visibility (SDV). SDV, together with the Visibility Fabric, becomes the foundation for the right security delivery architecture.

Security devices can be deployed either inline or out-of-band and dynamically obtain access to just the traffic they need—physical and virtual—anywhere in the infrastructure. With the programmatic interfaces that are exposed via the Visibility Fabric’s manager, a closed loop monitoring framework can be established by administrators to adapt to new anomalies that are discovered by the security device. APIs can also be
used to automate many operational tasks – such as assorted monitoring, reporting, capacity planning or integration with other IT operational management systems.

These are interesting times. Network transformation may appear to be a daunting, if not a dangerous challenge for network managers, but with the right solutions, no network is too big, too dynamic or too interesting to not have pervasive visibility.