Networking is changing rapidly, speed and bandwidth requirements have grown exponentially, new traffic types appear daily, and now a functioning network is a crucial and necessary part of running a successful large or small business in any market.
You are expected to provide critical business applications in a secure, always-up network environment. The end user expectations are now higher and simply creating a functioning network are mere "table stakes" in the network management game.
In order to meet these requirements you must deal with a myriad of dynamic forces that challenge your ability to meet these expectations:
- Growth - Growth is a new constant. It encompasses all aspects of networking, from new users, new applications and services, new use cases, faster processing, migrating networks from 1GE to 10GEto 40GE and 100GE
- Workforce Mobilisation - Users are on the move. People no longer expect to access the network from only one location. They expect to interact with data wherever they are.
- Infrastructure and technology changes - Change is the only permanent thing. Such advancements as virtualization, cloud services, and software defined networking (SDNs) must be seamlessly integrated into the existing network. At the same time, service level agreements (SLAs) must be maintained.
- Security - Change creates threat. Bring your own device (BYOD), social networking, a mobile workforce, and as new services open up weaknesses in network defenses. With our ever-increasing use of networking, intrusions and exploits promise to compromise network security.
While simply looking at layers 2-4 of the OSI model continues to have value, to respond and protect your network infrastructure you need to know what users and the application performance on the network. To respond to these challenges, we continue to add more monitoring, visibility and security tools all needing access to the same data on the production network.
Setting up an adaptive, intelligent network visibility architecture allows you to control cost by optimizing the investment value of monitoring and security tools that you own. A visibility architecture helps speed application delivery and enables effective troubleshooting and monitoring for network security, application performance, and service level agreement (SLA) fulfillment - and allows IT to meet compliance mandates
- Helps eliminate blind spots in the network by getting the right information to the right tools at the right time, greatly improving performance, QoE, and security
- Includes physical and virtual taps, bypass switches, and full-featured network packet brokers that solve network visibility needs - from single-point solutions to large-scale enterprise and service provider network deployments
- Extends the life of existing IT tools investments and maximizes the usefulness of the current tool capacity
- Easily integrates into automated and software defined data center environments
- Provides network visibility that is salable in every sense of the word - from product, to portfolio, to design, to management and support.
You need end-to-end visibility, meaning tool access to any point in the physical and virtual network, which allows all your tools to get what information it requires from the network, when you need it.