Safeguarding Against Cyberattacks

FIRM ELIMINATES  SECURITY BLIND SPOTS

As a personal lines insurer, there is much to protect. How many times have we all shuddered, hearing about personal information being breached, including identity, financial accounts, and even health records?  Cyberattacks are top-of-mind for companies who must maintain a level of trust and integrity with their customers, clients, and partners.

Having a security event in 2014 created an even stronger sense of urgency to strengthen overall security through improved network visibility. Awareness of this effort was reported to the CIO, the CISO and even the CEO.  Executives undoubtedly do not want to appear in articles on the biggest security breaches, like the one from Network World1 entailing, for example, how data was stolen on 22 million current and former federal employees from the federal Office of Personnel Management.

WHY NETWORK VISIBILITY?

This firm already had NPBs (network packet brokers) implemented by their network tools group. But now, the security group required NPBs to support several new security tools being deployed, including security analytics, firewalls, etc.

The Ixia solution allowed them to enhance their security posture by providing critical security information to those new security tools, more effectively protecting their infrastructure and reducing their exposure to damaging security breaches.

MORE RELIABILITY AND ZERO LOSS

Considering multiple vendors, the organization had to ensure resiliency of the solutions while implementing de-duplication, under load. The neutral, third-party partner working with this firm performed an “apples-to-apples” POC (proof of concept) comparison with Ixia solutions and another well-recognized network packet broker in the market.  This neutral partner was able to confirm that, contrary to the competitive system reporting, their solution was indeed dropping packets, as revealed by an internal counter.  Dropped packets create blind spots, compromise reliability and security. Learn more from the Tolly Report2 how Ixia provides zero-loss advanced packet process while other competing systems, lost packets (e.g. 72.6% frame loss for 64-byte frames), creating security blind spots.

The conclusion:  The company decided that Ixia could address their needs not only better than the competition, but more reliably as well.

IMPROVED IT TEAM PRODUCTIVITY

Finally, this company also chose to implement Ixia Indigo Pro Manager, providing a single pane of glass for management, central monitoring, and alarming of all Ixia gear.  Why?  The standard interfaces allow for easy configuration, statistics collection, and health monitoring. By automating processes such as software upgrades and configuration backups, Ixia Indigo Pro simplifies IT administrative tasks that would otherwise take days or weeks to complete, improving IT team productivity.