Introduction to Keysight CyPerf

The modern trends of SASE, Zero Trust and Cloud Migration are bringing major unknowns to the performance, scalability, and threat protection of network and security architectures. As networks evolve to more cost-effective and elastic off-premises infrastructures, understanding the security posture and identifying performance bottlenecks of such distributed networks is the key to providing consistent quality of experience and security to end users.

Keysight’s CyPerf is the industry’s first agent-based test solution that recreates every aspect of a realistic workload across a variety of physical and cloud environments to deliver insights into end user experience, cybersecurity posture, and performance bottlenecks of distributed networks. Test agents send application and attack traffic simultaneously through SASE solutions to validate the security efficacy of your SASE offerings and their impact on traffic performance. CyPerf employs lightweight agents deployed across a variety of environments to realistically model dynamic application traffic, user behavior, and threat vectors at scale. It validates cloud and hybrid networks, security devices, zero trust implementations and services for more confident rollouts.

Some of the challenges for validate performance and security of SASE solutions are:

• Maintain resiliency of SASE SD-WAN tunnels, debug and remediate tunnel disappearance and flapping, and other inconsistencies
• Measure key performance indicators like latencies and quality of experience and accurately attribute the delays/drops to factors like network, geographical distribution, SASE features, and cloud
• Demonstrate to customers the immediate value of SASE through live-traffic proof of concepts (POCs)
• Validate security efficacy of SASE offerings like URL f ilters, application controls, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), TLS inspection, and sandboxing
• Balance performance and protection for business continuity without compromised security

With CyPerf, Your Solution to Ensuring High-Performing SASE, you can:

• Deploy resilient SD-WANs by testing with distributed agents deployed in physical and cloud environments
• Emulate attacks to test security features like exploit detection / blocking, application profiling / blocking, malware mitigation, URL filtering, TLS inspection
• Generate application and attack traffic through distributed test agents to evaluate the performance / latency costs of security features, conduct demos and POCs, and verify SLAs and change-management
• Leverage diverse application simulation to validate unique SASE offerings like application shaping, policing, and control

Watch this video to understand the insights that CyPerf can deliver when working in such a highly distributed, unpredictable environment. The test will comprise CyPerf test agents deployed in physical locations and public clouds that are distributed across the globe from the US to Singapore. We will compare baselines with traffic emulated between agents in the same cloud and between agents distributed across the globe.

In summary, CyPerf can help you perform the following so you can test SASE, SSE and Zero Trust solutions:

• Test the functionality and performance of zero trust network access policies with authenticated and unauthenticated application traffic and security attacks
• Deploy CyPerf traffic agents in a distributed manner across various environments to cover different locations.
• Test key performance metrics such as maximum throughput and application latency, and many others. These may vary from location to location based on factors such as distance from the nearest POP and the capabilities of the POP.
• Emulate attacks that enable customers to test the security features of their network equipment such as exploit detection / blocking, application profiling / blocking, malware mitigation, URL filtering, and TLS inspection.
• Find the right balance between user experience and security. With any security architecture, the more features you enable or add, the more stringent the overall security becomes. This can incur a cost and tradeoff in terms of performance which often impacts user experience.
• CyPerf runs both legitimate application traffic and security attacks from the same agents in a safe closed loop environment with individual and granular control. This process enables users to fine-tune the balance between user experience and security.
• Analyze voice / video conferencing applications such as Zoom, with detailed QoE metrics including a mean opinion score (MOS), a number that reflects the audio quality of a call or a codec.