Ixia delivers end-to-end visibility for public cloud

Ixia, a provider of network testing, visibility, and security solutions, today announced it has further extended the reach delivered by the CloudLens Platform to the public cloud. CloudLens Public provides Visibility-as-a-Service (VaaS) and is the first to be implemented as a pure Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. It is designed from the ground up to retain the benefits of the cloud – elastic scale, flexibility, and agility. CloudLens Public provides intelligent and automated visibility as a service that scales with public cloud infrastructures.

Access to application and network data in cloud environments is critical for security and monitoring tools to ensure the reliability, security, and performance of mission-critical applications. Granular access to cloud traffic is important to avoiding blind spots in a network that can compromise application monitoring, as well as overall security.

Ixia has extended the benefits of the company’s CloudLens Platform to enable customers to capture and filter data in the public cloud. Designed as a SaaS platform, it does all the heavy lifting behind the scenes, freeing customers from managing visibility.

CloudLens Public delivers the following customer benefits:

· Provides elastic scale: packet visibility scales on demand with source and tool instances

· Delivers true intelligence: uses metadata tags native to cloud platforms, to provide enhanced filtering and manipulation capability

· Simple set up and easy to use: leverages a SaaS web-interface to manage cloud visibility allowing access anywhere, and features a drag and drop GUI. CloudLens manages all the visibility needs on the back end, so customers do not have to modify their existing architectures.

· Eliminates single point of failure: filters packet data at each source instance, so an inline virtual packet broker does not become a single point of failure in the network

· Reduces errors and the risk of compromise:

– Visibility is embedded within the instance structure, so it is highly secure, eliminating risk of cross tenant violations

– Visibility runs from behind SSL offload services, eliminating the need for decryption

· Reduces bandwidth to tools: packet filtering operations are performed at the source instances, eliminating unwanted traffic to tools and enabling them to operate optimally

“Visibility is key to security, but when workloads transit the public cloud, visibility can be lost.” said Jim Duffy, Senior Analyst, 451 Research. “Ixia’s CloudLens Public offers enterprises ‘visibility-as-a-service,' where all of the packet brokering takes place at the source. This could enhance scalability and network agility.”

CloudLens Public will initially be available in support of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Ixia plans to add support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in the second half of 2017. CloudLens Public offers a cloud-native, serverless design that lays the foundation for solving cloud scale problems and its intelligent, Docker-based architecture is cloud service provider agnostic. The Docker-based sensors run within a customer’s source and tool instances, inheriting the security configurations of the instances. In addition, the sensors have access to a wealth of information, and the platform can be programmed to continuously monitor new instances that automatically align for proper monitoring.

Leading security and monitoring solution providers that participated in the Ixia Public CloudLens beta program and performed joint validation include: FireEye, Dynatrace, CA Technologies, LogRhythm, NTOP, AppNeta, ProtectWise, NetFort Technologies and Savvius.

“FireEye is excited to partner with Ixia on its new CloudLens platform to extend our industry-leading visibility and response speed into AWS, Azure, and other public clouds,” said Martin Holste, CTO of Cloud, FireEye. “With our focus on simplifying, integrating, and automating security operations for customers with FireEye Helix, having scalable, native visibility into all cloud services, networks, endpoints, and third-party security products, enables us to stay ahead of our customer needs.”

“Ixia CloudLens Public was designed and built for the cloud and as a result, it is inherently elastic and scalable,” said Sushil Kumar, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Strategy, Agile Operations, CA Technologies. “CloudLens provides CA’s network monitoring solutions the visibility needed to monitor end-to-end response times to track and optimize the end user experience, no matter where an application is deployed.”