Over the years, I’ve met people that seem to think that investing in network visibility is either unnecessary, too expensive, or too complicated. None of these preconceptions could be further from the truth.
When done right, a visibility architecture (consisting of taps, packet brokers, and network tools) is absolutely essential to your ability to detect security threats and optimize both network and application performance. You can’t prevent or fix what you can’t see. This lack of visibility is why successful security attacks go undetected for days, weeks, and months. Literally, no one sees them.
When it comes to expenses, while visibility components do cost money, the right investment choices pay for themselves. A new brief was recently added to www.getnetworkvisibility.com that illustrates the value of network visibility. This paper (When Done Right – Visibility Pays For Itself) explains how you can achieve a return on investment (ROI) of 100% or more if you correctly install network visibility.
Before you dismiss the concept — read the brief. The savings come about because of several features and functions including: the delay (or elimination of tool expense) while you upgrade your network to 40, 100 or higher GE speeds, load balancing of critical data across multiple tools for more cost-effective redundancy, and a faster mean time to repair (MTTR) that results in less downtime or degraded operational functionality due to network and application problems.
Additional complexity due to visibility is a complete misconception. Network visibility helps reduce complexity, especially as business move towards cloud and multi-cloud networks. A properly constructed visibility architecture allows you to capture the right kind of data that your security and monitoring tools need to optimize performance and security. This is definitely important for Day 2 operational costs.
Another resource (The Technical and Financial Impact of Ease of Use on Network Visibility Solutions) how you reduce long term operational cost for visibility simply by picking the right type of solutions. The right solution will naturally be easy to use and maintain. This is why ease of use, explained in that paper, is so important and beneficial to IT teams.
This ease-of-use report also looks at two of the fundamental components of any visibility architecture — data access and network packet brokers. In addition, the report shows you why taps and packet brokers are superior to SPAN ports and some of the cost savings that you can realize by deploying this type of technology. In addition, the report also looks at a few of the network packet broker solutions on the market and provides critical insight into different product solutions.
Not many solutions can truthfully boast that they can save you money. Keysight’s visibility solution does. In addition to the When Done Right – Visibility Pays For Itself brief mentioned earlier, there are several case studies from Keysight that illustrate the cost savings as well.
Check out all of the materials at www.getnetworkvisbility.com to see how you can implement a network visibility solution that pays for itself.