Visibility is a Top Enterprise Security Priority in 2017: Survey

Ixia, a leading provider of network testing, visibility and security solutions, has announced findings from a survey of enterprise IT professionals that highlight the increasingly critical role of visibility in managing and securing their complex, heterogeneous networks.

Ixia surveyed over 220 senior IT staff at enterprises to determine what role visibility plays in helping IT professionals manage and secure their complex and heterogeneous networks. The results highlighted how network visibility can help IT professionals protect their organizations against threats and identify emerging issues,as well as gain visibility into cloud environments and encrypted traffic.

When asked how network visibility ranked as a priority in their IT programs in 2017, 61 percent of respondents named it as either their No. 1 priority or a top priority. Other key findings of the survey include:

• Visibility is key to breach discovery: More than half (54 percent) of respondents indicated that they most often discover a security breach through their network visibility solution. Forensic investigation was cited as the main method for breach discovery by 30 percent, and contact by a third-party by 19 percent.

• Visibility central to network monitoring and protection: A large number (54 percent) of respondents mentioned operating six or more network segments, but monitoring only half of them. Of the 40 percent of enterprises surveyed that handle more than 10,000 customer records, less than 10 percent actively monitor and protect their network.

• Visibility critical to revealing potential threats: When asked how visibility could help improve their security posture, 56 percent or respondents stated they want visibility into encrypted traffic on their networks, and 59 percent want to be able to identify applications requiring inspection. 31 percent wanted visibility into public clouds, and 29 percent wanted visibility into private cloud environments. More than 50 percent of the organizations surveyed use more than five security appliances, yet only 36 percent of respondents protect those security appliances with an external bypass.

• Cloud visibility and security concerns: 76 percent of respondents were ‘very concerned’ or ‘concerned’ about security in their cloud environment. The top security concern with cloud adoption was ‘loss of control over network data’ (56 percent) and being able to achieve full visibility across their networks (47 percent).

• Defeating DDoS attacks: As the threat of DDoS continues to rise, especially following the attacks of unprecedented scale launched using the Mirai botnet, 50 percent of respondents said network visibility solutions would help protect their organization against DDoS attacks, with a further 30 percent saying that it would help somewhat.

“Most enterprises today are struggling with network blind spots caused by increases in encrypted traffic on their networks and migrations to public and private cloud environments. They also need to get better visibility across their rapidly-expanding network estates to address performance issues and mitigate threats,” said Murali Ramalingam, Country Head- Sales, India at Ixia. “The reality is that security and analytics tools are only as good as the data they are seeing. As such, the only way to truly address these common and widespread challenges is with a strong visibility architecture. Ixia’s visibility solutions help eliminate these challenges, and enable customers to fully realize their investments in their existing security and monitoring tools.”

An organizations’ ability to gain clear visibility across their networks is increasingly challenged as more key business applications migrate to the cloud. In fact, the Cisco Global Cloud Index predicted that by 2020, 92 percent of workloads will be processed in public and private cloud data centers, and just 8 percent in traditional data centers. Enterprises are also struggling with the volumes of encrypted traffic entering and exiting their networks. A recent Ponemon study found that 64 percent of organizations cannot detect malicious SSL encrypted traffic, and 62 percent do not currently decrypt SSL traffic – yet half of all known cyber attacks used SSL encryption to evade detection in the past year.

Ixia’s Security Fabric architecture provides complete visibility across heterogeneous networks, using context-awareness and security intelligence to deliver de-duplicated and highly relevant traffic to organizations’ inline and out-of-band security and monitoring tools. Ixia’s Security Fabric helps ensure that the right data gets to the right tools, at the highest possible network speeds.