Ixia provides testing, visibility, and security solutions, strengthening applications across physical and virtual networks for enterprises, service providers, and network equipment manufacturers. Ixia offers companies trusted environments in which to develop, deploy, and operate. In an interaction with NCN, Bhaskar Agastya-Country Manger-sales, Ixia, India elaborates on Enterprise security challenges, evolving threats and solutions.
What are the key pain points of Enterprise security these days?
Many enterprises and carriers are still highly vulnerable to the effects of a security breach. Lack of knowledge, not cost, is the primary barrier to security improvements. Security resilience approaches are growing in worldwide adoption. The top two main security concerns for IT are data loss and malware attacks
What according to you are the biggest mistakes that makes enterprises vulnerable?
Organizations need to constantly monitor, test, and shift security tactics to keep ahead of attackers in the fast-paced threat landscape we all deal with today. This is especially important as new cloud services and increased IoT devices are routinely being introduced. To do this effectively, organizations must start by studying their evolving attack surface and ensure they have the proper security expansion measures in place. Simple but effective testing and operational visibility can go a long way to improving security.
How current evolving threat landscape can have a very real impact on the reputation and economics of today’s business?
The need for enterprise security has become more relevant with each attack. Most of the business realize the importance of network security only after a security breach. For enterprises, security is vital to avoid industry sabotage and espionage. It is frightening to imagine the aftermath of a security breach at a bank or other financial data base. Network security plays a huge role in safeguarding your business.
What organizations need to do, to stay ahead of attackers and threats?
It is important to analyze the potential threats for your business. Each business is exposed to different types of threats and one must think through the list of threats that are worth worrying over. This is why a risk assessment of relevant threats is necessary. It will give you a fair understanding of which risks are applicable to the business, how often it is expected to occur and the estimated loss. With the help of this information, businesses will be in a better position to take a call on which risks addressing first and what kind of remedial measures to adopt.
Irrespective of the size of the business, every organization must have a clear security policy in place. A policy that defines the usage of IT resources by employees is an absolute necessity these days. To provide foundation for a secured network, it is important to create awareness and undertake user education about the policy and its objective. Something as basic as defining and enforcing a corporate password policy will help in strengthening security.
Organizations must use an in-depth strategy while designing a secure network. It is ideal to not rely on a single device or product completely to administer security. Make sure to explore the security capabilities of a firewall or a router and confirm that software and servers are up-to-date. Employing application proxies for common applications and protocols is another way to ensure security by not revealing internal hosts to the internet.
It is very crucial to keep a tab on what operating system is running on each system on the network. This will help in understanding what vulnerabilities exist in each operating system and take relevant precautionary measures. Additionally, put in place an aggressive method of patching the operating system frequently to reduce the exposure from vulnerabilities.
Tell us about Ixia’s visibility solutions and how it helps eliminate challenges?
Ixia Visibility Solutions provide real-time, end-to-end visibility, insight and security into physical, virtual, SDN and NFV networks, delivering the control, coverage and performance in a seamless fashion to protect and improve crucial networking, data center and cloud business assets. Ixia’s solutions are based on a strong visibility architecture that lets you access traffic of all types from all locations with speed and accuracy, centrally process that traffic to get the data your tools need, and deliver that data with unsurpassed efficiency and reliability. Enterprises, government agencies, educational institutions, and service providers all need total visibility, without blind spots, to effectively manage network Security, both inline and out-of-band and network & application performance monitoring.
Investing in Ixia’s network visibility solutions provides a powerful, yet easy to learn and use management experience across all products and deployment scenarios allowing to optimize and offload network monitoring tools, while dramatically simplifying network monitoring. Not only does this provide actionable insight and higher productivity, but it also allows to deploy new technologies across infrastructure without having to retrain staff on yet another management interface or CLI.
