If the term Network Packet Broker (NPB) is not familiar, now is the time to get acquainted with this invaluable and frequently overlooked device. Think of NPBs as helpful middlemen that sort, distribute, and optimize the flow of network data going to your monitoring and security tools. By receiving only the data they need and eliminating irrelevant...

In today's connected world, your network is one of your most important assets. An underperforming network is something you cannot afford, be it from a performance or from a security standpoint, because it can greatly hinder your business's capabilities.In order to ensure optimum performance and security at all times, network engineers need a clear,...

By Jason Lackey, Network and Security Marketing, Keysight Technologies Monitoring tools have always been critical for ensuring network performance and security. Top vendors have designed new tools specifically for monitoring networks with virtualization, cloud infrastructure, distributed data centers, and edge computing. Way back in 2016, Enterpris...

 What is a Network Packet Broker? A Network Packet Broker (NPB) is a switch-like network device ranging in size from portables devices to 1 and 2 RU units, up to massive chassis and blade systems. Unlike a switch, a Network Packet Broker does not alter the traffic passing through it in any way unless specifically instructed to do so. An NPB ca...

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....

Do you have to give up on network availability when deploying your inline security tools? By using a iBypass switch "YOU DON'T HAVE TO CHOOSE"  When a network monitoring device such as an IPS is deployed inline in a network, it is vital to ensure that traffic continues to flow in all circumstances, even if the IPS loses power, so that mission-...

Would you like to see and detect more security threats in your production network? The key to inline security monitoring are fail-safe tool deployment, maximum traffic inspection, and super-fast failover. This white paper will show you how ​To access 100% of your network trafficIncrease the efficiency of your security toolsUse security intelligence...

A delicate balancing act is taking place on networks globally. It is the balance between applying strong protective measures to keep data safe and unintentionally concealing new IT security vulnerabilities. And it all centers on SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption. Just as SSL encryption protects certain details of a transaction, it can also conce...

 Advanced cyber threats, cloud computing, and exploding traffic volume pose significant challenges if you are responsible for your organization's network security and performance management. The concept of 'network visibility' is frequently introduced as the key to improvement. But what exactly is network visibility and how does it help an org...

Cloud computing has become the de facto foundation for digital business. As more and more enterprises move critical workloads to private and public clouds, they will face new challenges ensuring security, reliability, and performance of these workloads. If you are responsible for IT security, data center operations, or application performance, make...

Vision Edge 100 & Vision Edge 40 ​Expanding your hyperscale data center? Adding microscale data centers to provide a better experience for end users? Be sure to see everything, in every cluster—whether it is a part of your core infrastructure or a remote site—with the latest in Ixia's Vision Portfolio of network packet brokers (NPBs). Ixia has ...

Among the most useful pieces of physical hardware that networking professionals can utilize is a network tap. With a network tap, physical networks can be monitored for outliers as well as potential injection attacks. Network security vendor Ixia is now expanding its portfolio of network taps with the new Flex Tap Secure+. Kevin Formby, VP of market development at Ixia, told Enterprise Networking Planet that the new Flex Tap Secure+ is a net new addition to Ixia's portfolio and doesn't replace a...

2014 saw the creation of more than 317 million new pieces of malware. That means an average of nearly one million new threats were released each day. Here at Ixia we’ve been collecting and organizing threat intelligence data for years to help test the industry’s top network security products. Our Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) research center maintains one of the most comprehensive lists of malware, botnets, and network incursions for exactly this purpose. We’ve had many requests to l...

Once upon a time, all you needed was a firewall to call yourself “secure.” But then, things changed. More networks are created every day, every network is visible to the others, and they connect with each other all the time—no matter how far away or how unrelated. And malicious threats have taken notice . . . As the Internet got bigger, anonymity got smaller. It’s impossible to go “unnoticed” on the Internet now. Everybody is a target. Into today’s network landscape, every network is under the t...

Ixia, an international leader in application performance and security resilience technology, conducted a survey to better understand how network security resilience solutions and techniques are used within the modern enterprise. While information exists on security products and threats, very little is available on how it is actually being used and the techniques and technology to ensure that security is completely integrated into the corporate network structure. This report presents the research...

Ixia recently added passive SSL decryption to the ATI Processor (ATIP). ATIP is an optional module in several of our Net Tool Optimizer (NTO) packet brokers that delivers application-level insight into your network with details such as application ID, user location, and handset and browser type. ATIP gives you this information via an intuitive real-time dashboard, filtered application forwarding, and rich NetFlow/IPFIX. Adding SSL decryption to ATIP was a logical enhancement, given the increasin...

The Growing Impact of Social Networking Trends on Lawful Interception Lawful Interception (LI) is the legal process by which a communications network operator or Service Provider (SP) gives authorized officials access to the communications of individuals or organizations. With security threats mushrooming in new directions, LI is more than ever a priority and major focus of Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs). Regulations such as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), mandate...

One of the major issues that IT organizations have with any form of external cloud computing is that they don’t have much visibility into what is occurring within any of those environments. To help address that specific issue, Ixia created its Net Tool Optimizer, which makes use of virtual and physical taps to provide visibility into cloud computing environments. Now via the latest upgrade to that software, Ixia is providing support for both virtual and physical networks while doubling the numbe...

Flexible, Fail-Safe Inline Security Boosts Agility, Availability, and Resilience While Reducing Network Costs As networks deliver more services and carry ever-higher volumes of multiprotocol traffic, data rates continue to soar. Voice, data, and streaming video now travel on one wire, raising security and compliance issues. Today’s intense threat landscape demands multiple proactive security systems throughout the network for a strong, layered security posture. These proactive devices include fi...

Blind spots are a long-established threat to virtual data centers. They are inherent to virtual machine (VM) usage and technology due to the nature of VMs, lack of visibility for inter- and intra-VM data monitoring, the typical practices around the use of VM’s, and the use of multiple hypervisors in enterprise environments. Virtual machines by their nature hide inter- and intra-VM traffic. This is because the traffic stays within in a very small geographic area. As I mentioned in a previous blog...