Take Control of Intelligence Across Your Infrastructure With Gigamon, Cribl, and Blackwood

This Gigamon Power of 3 profile takes a look at the synergy between Cribl, Blackwood, and Gigamon. Kam Amir, Director, Technology Alliances, Cribl; Ryan Mullins, Solutions Architect, Blackwood; and Chris Dittert, Strategic Alliances Director, Gigamon explain how this joint solution helps organizations secure their networks in the midst of an ever-changing threat landscape.

What challenges do enterprises face when it comes to managing and optimizing network data for security and operations?

Ryan Mullins, Blackwood: Enterprises face significant challenges managing and optimizing network data for security and operations, often due to organizational silos and decentralized tooling. Multiple teams with differing priorities, budgets, and preferred tools create political hurdles and a reluctance to share resources or data.

This is compounded by a lack of centralized visibility, frequently resulting from organically grown, ad hoc tooling that addresses specific use cases but lacks a cohesive, enterprise-wide strategy.

Furthermore, the sheer volume and complexity of data across on-premises, hybrid, cloud, and SaaS environments, coupled with the rapid pace of network changes, exacerbates these challenges, making effective management and optimization incredibly difficult.

How do Gigamon and Cribl address these challenges together?

Chris Dittert, Gigamon: Organizations are faced with the challenge of securing their complex infrastructure in an ever-changing threat landscape. Unfortunately, this challenge includes many obstacles.

The threat landscape is aggressively becoming more sophisticated; infrastructures are constantly evolving; technological advancements like new applications and IoT/OT devices present a new frontier of challenges; and a lack of consistent investment in modernizing monitoring efforts have left organizations short-handed in the battle to secure their infrastructure.

Gigamon and Cribl provide a joint solution to help organizations gain complete observability across their entire infrastructure for efficient and effective identification of performance and security risks.

How does Gigamon’s network visibility and traffic intelligence technology integrate with Cribl’s data processing capabilities, and what are the primary benefits of filtering, enriching, and routing network data using this joint solution?

Kam Amir, Cribl: Gigamon and Cribl provide a joint solution to help organizations gain complete observability across their entire infrastructure for efficient and effective identification of performance and security risks. Cribl takes metadata extracted by Gigamon, reformats the data to match how each tool ingests data, and delivers the accessed intelligence to the specific tool.

The reformatting of accessed intelligence simplifies an organization’s ability to monitor and secure its infrastructure by eliminating the complexity of mapping data flows between the network to the tools themselves. Organizations can now focus on solely monitoring and securing their infrastructure without needing to worry about visibility blind spots or the complexities that come with delivering the accessed intelligence to tools.

What industries or organizations would benefit most from this combined solution?

Ryan: Organizations of all sizes, across virtually every industry, can benefit from the combined Gigamon and Cribl solution. Any organization with a network that has experienced challenges related to a lack of visibility, difficulties sharing data across siloed teams, or struggles delivering the necessary data to support use cases spanning security and operations will find value in this integrated approach.

Can you provide examples of typical use cases where the integration of Gigamon and Cribl adds measurable value?

Ryan: The Gigamon and Cribl integration delivers measurable value by addressing key network visibility and data management challenges. Gigamon provides comprehensive visibility across the entire network, including cloud environments, hypervisors, encrypted traffic, endpoints, and all network segments (North-South and East-West, and remote offices).

This visibility translates into a feed of optimized data, including flow maps and GigaSMART^®-modified packets (data/logs), delivered to Cribl. Cribl then further optimizes and enriches these logs, delivering them in a precisely formatted manner to the diverse tools used by security, network, database, cloud, and DevSecOps teams.

How seamless is the integration between Gigamon and Cribl for customers?

Chris: The Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline helps organizations access traffic across their entire hybrid cloud infrastructure and sends network-derived intelligence to all their tools. This centralized approach to accessing visibility allows organizations to efficiently monitor performance and secure their infrastructure without blind spots. Gigamon uses deep packet inspection to extract insightful metadata from packets accessed across the infrastructure.

Teams can access this valuable network and application metadata (L2–L7) to add a vital layer of intelligence to existing monitoring and security postures. Through Application Metadata Intelligence (AMI), Gigamon provides organizations visibility into the applications currently communicating across the network, including East-West traffic. This new source of intelligence combines traditional usage of metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) with over 6,000 applications and security-related attributes.

Cribl ingests metadata extracted by Gigamon, reformats the data to match how each tool accepts data, and delivers the accessed intelligence to the specific tool. The reformatting of accessed intelligence simplifies an organization’s ability to monitor and secure their infrastructure by eliminating the complexity of mapping data flows between the network to the tools themselves. Organizations can now focus solely on monitoring and securing their infrastructure without needing to worry about visibility blind spots or the complexities that come with delivering the accessed intelligence to tools.

In what ways does this joint solution improve the overall efficiency of incident detection and response?

Kam: The joint solution between Gigamon and Cribl provides an organization’s entire security and performance tool stack with complete visibility across their entire infrastructure. This allows our clients to easily meet the regulations of GDPR and HIPAA, so data handling is up to standard without extra hassle. We want to empower our clients to manage data responsibly while saving potential costs on penalties.

In the case of Cribl, organizations can leverage their formatting capabilities to simplify the process of delivering intelligence to tools in the format they require. Altogether, organizations can focus solely on identifying potential security and performance risks rather than having to deal with the complexities of delivering the data to tools.

How does this solution help organizations achieve greater ROI from their security investments?

Ryan: This solution maximizes ROI on security investments through a combination of optimization and futureproofing. By optimizing data at both the Gigamon and Cribl stages, the solution ensures each team receives the specific data they require, formatted for their tools. This streamlined approach, coupled with optimized data feeds, directly reduces costs, complexity, and bandwidth consumption.

Furthermore, the integrated Gigamon and Cribl solution empowers teams to architect their tools and infrastructure to not only meet current needs but also scale effectively year over year. This scalability prevents increasing costs from forcing compromises in network visibility and security as data volumes grow.

How does this partnership pave the way for more advanced network security and operational insights?

Kam: The cornerstone around what’s ahead is all based on the ability to collect, transform, and route more comprehensive data across the network, allowing for a clearer understanding of user activity and system behavior. With the joint technology solution between Gigamon and Cribl—armed with the power of Blackwood’s market share—the potential of opportunity is so very clear: even more choice, control, and flexibility around even the most robust telemetry data management strategies.

To learn more, visit our Power of 3 page.

CONTINUE THE DISCUSSION

People are talking about this in the Gigamon Community’s Security group.

Share your thoughts today