Network Visibility Is the Key to Empowering Your Tools and Teams

As networks become faster and new technologies are introduced into your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure, visibility often becomes a critical challenge. The increased mobility of users, applications and devices, along with an exploding volume of data, makes it difficult for network and security teams to perform accurate and timely analysis.

Empowering your IT teams and tools requires centralized and pervasive visibility and reliable access to corporate data.

Without a single accurate and comprehensive view into network data, your IT teams and tools can’t realize their full strategic potential to optimize performance, detect and respond to threats, and analyze trends.

Empowering IT Teams

As IT departments are increasingly measured against internal SLAs, their success depends on access to a wide breadth and depth of traffic intelligence to support them in their day-to-day activities and strategic projects.

When teams lack a comprehensive view into your organization’s data in motion, they are forced to spend a lot of time and resources manually collecting data from disparate places.

Resources are often wasted as teams find themselves hunting down the owners of multiple tools in various environments (physical, virtual and cloud) and manually compiling and normalizing all the various data they receive for analysis. This not only eats into their time with manual, repetitive tasks, but it also dramatically extends their time to response for both potential security threats and network issues.

Though it’s essential to govern access to network information through effective privilege management, it’s necessary for IT staff to have the right access for their roles. Empowering your organization’s IT teams with the visibility they need into the entire infrastructure is a critical step towards providing accurate, real-time data they need to analyze network and security incidents and take appropriate action.

Empowering Tools

Like security and network teams, tools also become ineffective when visibility into the infrastructure is limited. With the need to connect so many tools to a rapidly changing IT environment, tools can often become highly inefficient and unsustainable when there is limited access to data in motion, making it difficult to spot trouble.

Traditionally, tools would directly attach into the production network inline or through TAPS or mirror/SPAN ports, but the finite number of TAPs or SPAN ports, evolving topologies and high data volumes can leave organizations with costly tool sprawl and security blind spots.

With this traditional approach, these tools reach the limit of their processing capability at some point, forcing traffic and data to be dropped and result in costly tool upgrades, or worse, affecting network performance for your users.

Additionally, evaluating new tools often must be executed one at a time, stringing out a simple evaluation from a few days to weeks or months.

However, by moving to a centralized visibility model and arming your tools with only the right data they need to perform their function, not only can existing tool capacity be maximized but the tools can also be more effective and efficient at their respective jobs.

Providing each inline and out-of-band tool the data it needs to process exactly what it needs, nothing more, nothing less, increases its coverage and ROI.

With pervasive visibility into network traffic, security tools can ensure that detection and protection tools don’t overlook threats to your environment and analysis tools can better detect patterns and trends with richer, more accurate data. This approach also gives network and application performance monitoring tools the visibility they need to confirm an IT service is performing as expected for employees or customers.

The Gigamon Approach

The Gigamon Security Delivery Platform provides you with the ability to non-intrusively collect and aggregate data in motion across your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure. This centralized visibility empowers your network and security teams to focus on what’s important and maintain a secure network ready to change or grow based on your company’s needs.

Ready to Empower Your  IT Teams and Tools?

If your IT teams are struggling with visibility or looking for a better way to manage and maximize their tools, get in touch today and take a moment to watch our CEO Paul Hooper discuss the importance of achieving centralized visibility in your organization today.