Enterprise Challenges with Network Visibility: Requirements, Considerations, and Use Cases
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Executive Summary
Enterprises have specific needs to secure and manage the nervous system of their IT system—which is their network. Network visibility helps ensure application performance because most applications are highly dependent on the network. Thus network visibility is critical to supporting the business.
Compliance, auditing, and security requirements demand visibility into how IT resources interoperate, and network visibility is required to gain insights into how well they are functioning. If IT organizations do not have complete network visibility, resulting blind spots may lead to missing critical security threats and availability or performance anomalies.
The use cases that require complete visibility include the introduction of BYOD devices, unknown network devices, and integration with a multitude of security tools. In all cases, missing a complete view of the network can lead to mistakes in critical IT and business decision making, leaving the enterprise open to security vulnerabilities, as well as poor application and network performance that could be detrimental to revenue generation or even cause reputational damage stemming from security breaches.
ESG research has shown that network security and performance are among the critical challenges reported by IT decision makers today.1 By implementing solutions offering modern network visibility, IT organizations can translate network insight into clear business value and derive superior ROI from these solutions.
Enterprise Needs
How can the problems of enterprise networks be addressed by better, deeper network visibility? What does visibility provide to the business at the end of the day? What gets missed without appropriate visibility? The answers go deeper than IT issues. Once network visibility is established to benefit IT, organizations need to understand the business value and ROI of having greater insight into network performance.
Challenges
IT organizations must see everything in order to know what they are missing and gain the right levels of insight into the enterprise. Partial visibility is not an answer because unless 100% of the network activity is visible, IT teams can’t know what’s missing. Partial visibility is effectively the same as having a blind spot. Enterprise challenges related to network visibility span a wide range of areas, including security posture, traffic control, and performance.
Enterprises require audit and compliance for regulations that can include COBIT 5, COSO, FedRAMP, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC 1/2/3, SOX, and many more, and these regulations often have direct connections to how IT systems are deployed and operated. Visibility also matters because when IT doesn’t understand precisely what is happening to the network, they cannot, with confidence, attest to compliance with regulatory requirements.
Enterprise network loads also continue to increase, and new uses that increase server-to-server traffic, such as data analytics, augment traditional endpoint to data center server traffic, as well as endpoint and server traffic to the Internet. If one operation slows down network speeds in order to ensure proper security or visibility, it will be a detriment to overall business goals. In other words, if the nervous system of the enterprise is the IT network, businesses cannot afford to slow it down or lack total visibility into how well it is performing.