Imagine you buy a brand new Bugatti and plan to travel across the beautiful landscape of the European shores, enjoy the stunning view and the fresh air, but suddenly, you find out that some of the best roads are blocked and you are going to miss some of the best views. What a disappointment! At least when you are driving a car, you know what you may be missing, but this does not apply when you shift to the cyber world. Now imagine that the new and expensive Bugatti is the recent cyber security tool that you have recommended to your company to purchase, and that management expects that it will ..read more

It is common wisdom that Cyber Security and Monitoring applications that analyze network traffic must have full network visibility to avoid ‘blind spots’ that may be the source of a cyber security attack. In a previous post named Network Visibility and Cyber Security, we explained why the industry is shifting from SPAN/Mirror ports towards Network Packet Broker solutions. This post focuses on the 5 hidden costs that you want to avoid when deploying Network Packet Brokers, or NPB in short, that enable and optimize your cyber security and monitoring tools and applications. The high cost of not ..read more

When looking into Network Packet Broker (NPB) features there are many use cases for those devices, In this post I’ll cover an ‘advanced cross connect’ Use-case for a cost effective automated testing environments. The NPB Standard Features: Many-to-many port mapping, with a configuration interface (graphical user interface [GUI] or command line interface [CLI]) for real-time adjustments of packet flow, including port mapping and paths. Filtering of packet data based on the characteristics found in the packet headers, allowing the filtering of Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Layer 2 through ..read more

In today’s complex and fast growing network infrastructure, where network traffic is always on the rise and network capacity is added to the network pipes, cyber security tools are often overwhelmed with network traffic that they cannot handle. The inability to process all network traffic or the lack of remaining resources to analyze data due to over utilization, creates security risks that the enterprise must avoid. The network congestion, generated by duplicated packets and unfiltered traffic, has a negative impact on both customers and vendors. A cyber security vendor will not be able to s ..read more

Network Packet Brokers or NPB, have become a critical network layer that enables and optimizes Cybersecurity and Network Performance Management (NPM) tools. It resolves the top two network related challenges: avoiding network ‘blind spots’ and network congestion that overutilizes tool resources. Server Based NPB is an important part of CGS’ strategy to deliver the next generation of Network Visibility solutions which leverages powerful, scalable and reliable off-the-shelf hardware platforms that provide superior performance and significant cost reduction. While NPB have been traditionally del ..read more

The age of Internet encryption has started, when I say started, it started a long time ago, but now it is at its climax. There are many forces driving this rapid adoption: monetization of intellectual property owned by the rulers of the internet: Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, E-Bay, Amazon. The rise of SAAS (e.g. O365, Salesforce, Workday or alike and the Public clouds (AWS, Azure, Google …) where infrastructure and applications alike, are born natively encrypted on the wire. Technology changes and reputation at stake, has its contribution to the adoption. It is all about how the application is ..read more

Network Packet Brokers have become a core part of the network infrastructure, allowing enterprises to optimize their cyber security and NPM/APM deployments by providing full network visibility, filtering, DPI and load balancing. Traditionally, packet brokers were vertically integrated with inextricable hardware and software. This worked well for a while, however, as network traffic and capacities increased exponentially, proprietary packet broker hardware could rarely meet the performance requirements and required massive and expensive deployments that most customer could not afford. Disaggreg ..read more

For many years the network visibility market has relied on the silicon chip features (Switch chips, FPGAs etc.) to define the feature capabilities which were offered to customers. Tools that are developed by the hardware vendors are bound to the innovation of these chips manufacturers. This resulted in solutions that are expensive to purchase and limited in the features and capacity they can supply. Due to the nature of hardware development cycles, network visibility features cannot catch up fast enough with the requirements of customers for more complicated requirements and use cases like sea ..read more

COVID-19 has changed the world, as we know it, forever. Social distancing, supply chain challenges, working remotely, the growing dependency on connectivity and network infrastructure, migration to the cloud, increase in cyber security risks, and economic crisis, are here to stay, in one shape or form. Now you probably wonder how this is related to SDN. Well, it does, and I will use the example of Software Defined Packet Brokers (SDPB) that provide the network visibility for cyber security and network monitoring solutions. CGS has revolutionized the network visibility market when it announced ..read more

Smart Grid Objectives The objective of the Smart Grid is to modernize the power utilities infrastructure with two-way digital communications in order to improve grid reliability, reduce costs and enable integration of renewable energy sources. The Network Visibility Challenge The new communication infrastructure introduces new cyber security risks that span across electricity generation, transmission and distribution. Cyber security and monitoring applications are typically deployed within the utility data center in order to secure and monitor the Smart Grid network infrastructure as well as t ..read more