High Traffic and Need for Security and Visibility Spur 100GE Redesign

The University of Texas (UT) at Austin is a noted institution, with the fifth-largest single-campus enrollment in the United States. Over 50,000 undergraduate and graduate students, along with more than 24,000 faculty and staff create a dynamic educational environment that generates massive volumes of raw application traffic to monitor. This traffic poses major security and cost-efficiency challenges for the university.

Digital Security, Serving Higher Education, and Controlling Costs

UT’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is tasked with providing solid security amidst increasing threats, as well as preparing his Incident Response team to react quickly, appropriately, and effectively. The University also conducts a number of Cyber Range initiatives that the redesign will fortify. Cyber Ranges are vast test beds that allow war games and simulations to strengthen cyber security defenses and skills. The CISO also plans to use UT’s new capabilities to help instruct Ethical Hacking classes taught in the Department of Computer Science.

A Robust yet Space-Saving Solution with an  Easy-to-use GUI

The Keysight team proposed a solution using Keysight’s Vision 7300™ with the AppStack. The Vision 7300 chassis is designed for large organizations like UT that require monitoring and network security tools for end-to-end network visibility and security across physical and virtual networks. The AppStack delivers real-time application data to monitoring tools and solves the network administrator’s need for total network visibility beyond Layer 4. The AppStack also features an advanced GUI that provides users with unrivaled control, accuracy, and ease-of-use.

Substantial Savings on IDS Investment

UT plans to use Keysight’s AppStack technology to define a group of Internet-streaming video services, including Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, and so forth. The IT Information Security Office will sub-tract this streaming video traffic (a significant portion of their traffic volume) from the total amount. Remaining traffic will be sent on to UT’s IDS sensor stack for logging, alerting, incident remediation, and other functions. Using AppStack to remove this huge amount of streaming video traffic allows UT to employ 20–30 percent less IDS capacity, saving significant capital cost, and optimizing current IDS investment. By updating the AppStack application database as new apps are developed, Keysight enables UT to seamlessly scale and evolve their solution to new application traffic.

Keysight’s veteran team worked alongside UT’s expert security team to build a solution that met UT’s changing network topology needs. The solution incorporates Keysight’s tech partners, including Cisco Sourcefire, and provides UT the key ability to classify traffic by applications.

The NTO 7300 Offers Commanding Visibility and Security Technology

The Vision 7300 and Keysight’s Visibility Architecture provide the most scalable network visibility framework in the industry. The Vision 7300 solves UT’s need for improved security and performance, and for visibility into its growing 100GE footprint with 10GE and 40GE tools. The Packet Capture Module (PCM) gives UT built-in, single UI packet capture and Wireshark decode monitoring capability, for quick troubleshooting of performance, security and availability issues, and fast mean time to resolution (MTTR). Additionally, the 7300’s PacketStack optimizes monitored network traffic, so that it includes only the most relevant information needed for analysis, improving security and performance, enabling rapid scalability, and maximizing control.