How shocking would it be to learn that a dangerous intruder has been hiding in your home for six months?
Worse, you only know after your neighbors tell you. What? Not only is it scary, it's not just a little creepy. Hard to even imagine.
However, this is exactly what happens in many security breaches. The Ponemon Institute's 2020 Cost of a Data Breach report shows that organizations take an average of 206 days to identify a breach and an additional 73 days to contain it.Unfortunately, many companies discover a security breach from someone outside the organization, such as a customer, partner, or law enforcement.
Malware, viruses, and Trojans can sneak into your network and go undetected by your security tools. Cybercriminals know that many businesses cannot effectively monitor and inspect all SSL traffic, especially as traffic increases at scale.They put their hopes on it, and they often win the bet. It's not uncommon for IT and SecOps teams to experience "alert fatigue" when security tools identify potential threats in the network -- a condition experienced by more than 80 percent of IT staff. Sumo Logic research reports that 56% of companies with more than 10,000 employees receive more than 1,000 security alerts per day, and 93% say they cannot handle all of them on the same day. Cybercriminals are also aware of alert fatigue and rely on IT to ignore many security alerts.
Effective security monitoring requires end-to-end visibility into traffic on all network links, including virtual and encrypted traffic, without packet loss.Today, you need to monitor more traffic than ever before. Globalization, IoT, cloud computing, virtualization, and mobile devices are forcing companies to extend the edge of their networks into hard-to-monitor places, which can lead to vulnerable blind spots.The larger and more complex your network, the greater the chance that you will encounter network blind spots. Like a dark alley, these blind spots provide a place for threats until it's too late.
The best way to address risk and eliminate dangerous blind spots is to create an inline security architecture that checks and blocks bad traffic immediately before it enters your production network.
A robust visibility solution is the foundation of your security architecture as you need to quickly examine the vast amounts of data traversing your network to identify and filter packets for further analysis.
The Network Packet Broker (NPB) is a key component of the inline security architecture. The NPB is a device that optimizes traffic between a network tap or SPAN port and your network monitoring and security tools. The NPB sits between bypass switches and inline security appliances, adding another layer of valuable data visibility to your security architecture.
All packet proxies are different, so choosing the right one for optimal performance and security is critical. The NPB utilizing Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware accelerates the NPB's packet processing capabilities and provides full wire-speed performance from a single module. Many NPBs require additional modules to achieve this level of performance, increasing the total cost of ownership (TCO).
It is also important to choose an NPB that provides intelligent visibility and context awareness.Advanced features include replication, aggregation, filtering, deduplication, load balancing, data masking, packet pruning, geolocation and marking. As more threats enter the network through encrypted packets, also choose an NPB that can decrypt and quickly inspect all SSL/TLS traffic. Packet Broker can offload decryption from your security tools, reducing investment in high-value resources. The NPB should also be able to run all advanced functions simultaneously. Some NPBs force you to choose functions that can be used on a single module, which leads to investing in more hardware to take full advantage of the NPB's capabilities.
Think of NPB as the middleman that helps your security devices connect seamlessly and securely to ensure they don't cause network failures. NPB reduces tool load, eliminates blind spots, and helps improve mean time to repair (MTTR) through faster troubleshooting.
While an inline security architecture may not protect against all threats, it will provide a clear vision and secure data access. Data is the lifeblood of your network, and tools sending the wrong data to you, or worse, losing data entirely due to packet loss, will leave you feeling safe and protected.
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Post time: Apr-18-2022
