Gigamon Honored to Be Recognized in Six Gartner Hype Cycle Reports

In 2024, Gigamon was recognized as a Sample Vendor in six Hype Cycle reports from Gartner® which included eBPF technology:

Gartner, Hype Cycle for Workload and Network Security, 2024 (Requires Gartner subscription)

Gartner, Hype Cycle for Monitoring and Observability, 2024 (Requires Gartner subscription)

Gartner, Hype Cycle for Container Technology, 2024 (Requires Gartner subscription)

Gartner, Hype Cycle for Compute, 2024 (Requires Gartner subscription)

Gartner, Hype Cycle for Zero-Trust Networking, 2024 (Requires Gartner subscription)

Gartner, Hype Cycle for APIs, 2024 (Requires Gartner subscription)

In the fast-evolving world of IT, staying ahead of emerging technologies and managing their underlying risks is crucial. I have found the Gartner Hype Cycle to be an invaluable tool for businesses to help them gauge when to invest in new technologies and when to exercise caution, depending upon their risk appetite. More specifically, Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities.

As discussed in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Workload and Network Security, 2024, eBPF (previously known as extended Berkeley Packet Filter) is expected to reach mainstream adoption in two to five years. From my perspective, it is moving beyond early adopters to broader industry interest as more organizations begin to leverage the benefits. As Gartner explains, eBPF is an enhancement to the Linux operating system kernel that allows specific instruction sets to run (sandboxed) inside the kernel. It enables companies to add features to Linux without changing kernel source code or requiring kernel modules.1 It’s a modern approach to capture telemetry for security and performance monitoring and observability purposes.

Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Workload and Network Security, 2024

eBPF supports various use cases, including high-performance networking and load-balancing in modern data centers and cloud environments, detailed security observability with minimal overhead, application tracing, performance troubleshooting, and proactive security enforcement for applications and container runtimes.2

Figure 2. GigaVUE Universal Cloud Tap deployment options across virtual and cloud platforms.

Gartner acknowledges that eBPF is known to improve observability, security, and performance for applications, but most enterprises will not use it directly. Technology vendors do use eBPF as an underpinning technology in their products and services to improve the performance and safety of programs that run on Linux.

To receive the full benefit, Gartner is recommending users: 1) migrate to more modern platforms if your organization is still using Linux distributions with limited or no eBPF support, 2) seek eBPF-based Kubernetes CNI solutions when scale, performance, visibility, and security are top priorities, and 3) use Linux variants that provide eBPF support to enable network performance, visibility, and security products.

Continuing our history of innovation, Gigamon is leveraging eBPF for both container tapping and next-gen VM tapping across all virtual and cloud platforms in the GigaVUE® Universal Cloud Tap.

Because it’s based on Linux eBPF and uses kernel-level constructs, it’s the fastest, most efficient general-purpose tap on the market. Additionally, Gigamon uses eBPF to power its Precryption® technology, which improves the accuracy of NDR and other security tools by providing plaintext visibility into encrypted traffic without the burden of traditional packet decryption.

The Gartner Hype Cycle is an essential tool for navigating the complex IT landscape and helping customers make well-informed, strategic decisions. Read the Hype Cycle for Workload and Network Security, 2024 now and see how modern technology like eBPF offers a safer and simpler way to add capabilities such as performance, security, and visibility in Linux.

References

Hype Cycle for Workload and Network Security, 2024. Gartner. 2024. Accessed September 22, 2024. https://www.gartner.com/document-reader/document/5608191

eBPF Documentation: What is eBPF? eBPF. Accessed September 22, 2024. https://ebpf.io/what-is-ebpf/

*This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Gigamon.

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