Stop the Sprawl: Security at the Speed of the Network

I’m an authentic geek and I watch every single superhero movie and TV series available, no matter how good or bad they are. One of my favorite superheroes since I was a little kid has been the Flash. He lives in a world with no bottlenecks. He gets things done so fast – seemingly immediately – that we can’t see it.

Wouldn’t it be great if our security tools worked the same way? If they no longer had bottlenecks and slowed down our networks? If they would immediately process traffic at the speed they are fed data packets?

Security at the speed of the network – what a great goal.

Gigamon reached a major milestone towards achieving that goal. On December 5, we announced that GigaSECURE® would be the first scalable SSL decryption solution for 100Gb networks. That’s right. The GigaSECURE Security Delivery Platform is the industry’s first visibility solution to support SSL/TLS decryption for high-speed 100Gb and 40Gb networks while ensuring high network resilience with physical and logical bypass protection. For you, this means additional ways to earn value from your security infrastructure:

Set up an efficient “decrypt once, inspect many times” security architecture.

Further boost the ROI of your existing tools even as you move to 100Gb networks.

Enable visibility into encrypted traffic that’s leaving the enterprise to go to applications, such as Office365 or Dropbox.

Extend the life cycle of your existing security investments while moving your networks into the future.

The Need to Handle Speed

Many enterprises are considering embarking on a digital transformation journey. With more data to handle than ever before, they will need to upgrade to high-speed networks running at 40Gb or 100Gb.

At the same time, more and more network packets will be encrypted – in fact, up to 80 percent by 2019.[i] To get visibility into that network traffic and sniff out malware or data exfiltration, security pros need SSL/TLS decryption capabilities — and unfortunately, many security tools either lack those capabilities or can’t keep up with the demands of a 100Gb network.

With the latest version of GigaVUE-OS, the software that drives the GigaSECURE Security Delivery Platform, we bring decryption to 100Gb architectures, decrypting packets once and distributing them to any tools that need to inspect their contents. We provide the right data to the right tool at the right throughput: 1Gb, 10Gb, 40Gb or even, 100Gb.

Protect Your Existing Investments

You probably aren’t starting from scratch and have already invested in security tools that have become crucial to your security. When it comes to upgrading your network, however, your tools may be holding you back. Most security tools nowadays can only handle 40Gb at most, and yours may only handle 10Gb.

By taking over the job of decrypting SSL traffic, the GigaSECURE Security Delivery Platform takes a huge burden off your existing infrastructure. Not all the traffic that goes through your network has to be routed to every tool and the GigaSECURE Security Delivery Platform can feed your tools exactly the traffic they need. It allows your tools to operate on a new, faster network and removes a major objection most IT professionals might have to an upgrade to 100Gb – they no longer need to worry about leaving their existing security tools behind.

Get More Bang for Your Buck

In many cases, your infrastructure might be utilizing your tools’ capabilities inefficiently. Each appliance is doing its own SSL decryption and needs to sort through all incoming traffic to find the packets it controls. Gigamon offers a “decrypt once, inspect many times” design, delivering decrypted data to multiple inline and out-of-band tools simultaneously within a decryption zone.

The result is a more efficient use of your security resources, which in turn makes your infrastructure more secure. It also minimizes the latency from your network and allows tools to focus on what they do best. Now that your security architecture can run at 100Gb, just like your network, you can be smarter about what traffic you should inspect.

The most important thing you can do is evaluate how much benefit you would gain from upgrading your security architecture to 100Gb without having to change your current tools. If you are thinking of upgrading to a 100Gb or 40Gb network, you might be concerned about your security tools’ ability to keep up. Check in with us, we’ll help you accelerate your security architecture to the speed of your network.

In the comics, the Flash is so fast that he can freeze a scene, analyze a situation and neutralize threats. The GigaSECURE Security Delivery Platform does something similar, even at 40Gb and 100Gb: With it, your security solutions get more time to analyze the data and make the right decision for the security of your network.

For more details, check out the GigaSECURE Security Delivery Platform.

[i] Gartner, Inc., “Predicts 2017: Network and Gateway Security,” December 13, 2016.