Extending Reach of the Security Delivery Platform to Mid-market

A common challenge faced by smaller enterprises is the ability to get sufficient visibility to secure their infrastructure and streamline their security operations. According to a recent Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) survey, 85% of surveyed organizations reported that the complexity of network security operations has not improved in the past two years. The primary reasons cited include increases in traffic and the number of network devices, diversity of networking and security technologies in use, the secops grind of keeping up with known vulnerabilities and emerging threats, and the difficulty in getting visibility across the entire network. Indeed, a full 75% of surveyed organizations reported that they need better network visibility. These issues are not isolated to just small enterprises. Large distributed enterprises with lots of remote sites face an identical challenge in gaining visibility into the remote sites as well.

A Security Delivery Platform such as GigaSECURE^® from Gigamon, looks inside the perimeter of an organization by processing network traffic and delivering the right traffic flows and metadata to security tools. This approach to providing pervasive visibility for security is intended to address exactly the challenges faced by security operations and network operations teams described by survey respondents above. In smaller enterprises and remote sites part of a larger distributed enterprise, the challenge is more acute because of the limited number of personnel dedicated to these roles. As such, the ability to do multiple functions instead of deploying point products provides the administrator the flexibility to do more with less. Overall, the Security Delivery Platform enables the ability to see more of the network traffic, thereby securing more of the infrastructure.

To address these challenges, we introduced a new visibility appliance to our portfolio today, the GigaVUE-HC1, which extends the reach of the GigaSECURE Security Delivery Platform to the mid-market segment, i.e. small enterprises and remote sites owned by distributed enterprises.

The all-in-one, single rack unit design of the GigaVUE-HC1 incorporates the key security pillars of visibility reach, metadata generation, inline bypass protection and single pane of glass management. The GigaVUE-HC1 base chassis has four RJ-45 ports for 10/100/1000Mbps and twelve 1Gbps/10Gbps interfaces, together with an onboard GigaSMART traffic intelligence engine. Two slots in the modular chassis add flexibility and expandability as security and visibility requirements grow. For example, a Copper TAP module provides inline physical bypass protection to streamline deployment of inline security tools, eliminating the need for external TAPs, thereby conserving space and offering simplicity.

Because remote sites and branch offices are geographically distributed, the security tools that process data from these locations may not always be locally located. With the GigaVUE-HC1, remote sites can deploy local security tools while simultaneously sending metadata or IPFIX/NeFlow records to a security tool (e.g. a SIEM) that is centrally deployed. When advanced packet-based analysis of data from a remote site is needed, the GigaVUE-HC1 can also tunnel pure packet data across the WAN, even removing duplicates and slicing packets to conserve WAN bandwidth. IT organizations save money not only by not having to deploy expensive analytic tools at every remote site, but also by reducing management and administration costs.

The GigaVUE-HC1 runs the same GigaVUE-OS operating system software and provides the same capabilities such as Flow Mapping®, GigaStream™, and clustering capabilities that are proven in the rest of the H Series family of products. With GigaVUE-FM Fabric Manager, users have a single pane of glass through which they can manage their entire Visibility Platform investment, including the GigaVUE-HC1.

The GigaVUE-HC1 is one more reason why we believe the GigaSECURE Security Delivery Platform enables an organization to “see more and secure more”!