Monitoring and Security of Distributed Networks

Large European Financial Institution Deploys Vision Packet Brokers

A large European financial institution wanted enhanced visibility into traffic across its global network to better manage and troubleshoot errors, monitor day-to-day performance, and effectively secure its vast network of data centers. They were looking for an easy-to-use, scalable tool to cover multiple sites.

Company:

• European financial institution

Key Issues:

• lack of end-to-end visibility for monitoring and securing the network

• challenges meeting regulatory compliance criteria

• centralized traffic capture from multiple data centers

Solutions:

• Vision X

• Vision Edge 100

• Flex Fiber Taps

Results:

• increased network visibility across multiple data centers

• meets or exceeds regulatory requirements

• seamless, transparent capture of network traffic

Key Issues: Distributed Network Across Multiple Data Centers

Understanding the end-to-end flow of applications and how they traverse the network can be challenging. Financial institutions have specific and demanding requirements in terms of availability, security, and functionality.

A network visibility architecture can support both passive monitoring and failsafe inline security deployments essential to ensure the captured data from their multidata locations occur simultaneously. 

The financial institution required a holistic, end-to-end view of traffic spanning multiple data centers to help secure its complex network. Additionally, an existing security tool requiring only web traffic in the first deployment was overloaded, which resulted in false-positive alarms.

Faced with these challenges, Keysight partnered with the customer to provide a solution to monitor and secure their global network.

Solution: Vision Series Network Packet Broker

Keysight Vision Series network packet brokers (NPBs) optimize traffic, providing enhanced visibility and security coverage. NPBs resolve application performance bottlenecks, troubleshoot problems, and improve data center automation. NPBs aggregate and filter the data sent to monitoring tools with intelligent grooming and security enhancements such as deduplication, SSL decryption, data masking, and application and threat intelligence.

Positioned between traffic input and output ports to connect directly to monitoring and security tools, the Vision Series network packet brokers act as an intelligent packet distribution layer.

Deployment

Fabric Controller Centralized Manager

Keysight’s Ixia Fabric Controller (IFC) Centralized Manager provides a single pane of glass view, enabling centralized management for multiple NPBs. This eliminates the need to log in to or manage each node separately.

Simple to use, the visibility fabric created by the fleet of packet brokers combined with the IFC Centralized Manager enabled the operations team to administer the system and implement configuration changes in only a few clicks using the drag and drop interface. The Vision Series packet broker’s intuitive online interface provides visibility into traffic across multiple data centers in a single view. Regardless of where it comes from, traffic is centrally aggregated, filtered, and processed through a single interface and a single set of centrally managed security and monitoring policies.

By deploying multiple models of Vision NPBs, the customer now has a global visibility architecture in place that aligns each NPB to meet the operational requirements of the site or location where it is deployed. Capture speeds varied widely, ranging from 1 Gb to 10 Gb. Support for each speed was essential to ensure end-to-end visibility.