Lessons from a giant

With enterprises becoming largely dependent on their networks, ensuring security and preventing anomalies in these networks is nothing short of a Herculian task for a network engineer. A network is subject to a whole lot attacks varying in forms and the impacts it could have on the network. We are aware of the fact that, a lot of companies offer online services and they require sensitive information like credit card numbers and Tax Identification numbers to be transmitted through their networks. An attack on the company's network that transmits sensitive data of a huge customer base is something that would not just leave the company at loss of customer reputation and financial loss, but also invite legal hurdles for compromising sensitive information which could affect thousands of its customers. Overall, the consequences of a network attack are very damaging and it is in the hands of the network engineer to secure the network and constantly monitor the health of the network.

And the engineer does not have all the sweet time in the world for ensuring this. There is always a rush and it is very much possible to overlook the security aspect of the network despite the consequences, in the rush for innovation. This rush for innovating is certainly important in a dynamic market where-in, the slightest delay could make one lose the competitive edge. So, what at all could a company do to prevent ending up at crossroads? The need of the hour is a clear and an uncompromising view of the security snapshot of the network. Not just that! Time is the most vital factor here. If there is way to check out the overall security posture view of the network in one quick glance! EUREKA! ASAM is here!

This is exactly what ASAM does. The Advanced Security Analytics Module(ASAM) is an add-on of Netflow Analyzer, which was developed keeping in mind, these kind of network attacks. A couple of years ago, this would have been too much of an exaggeration to think of an attack of this magnitude, but then, the entire world is witnessing such threats today. It is high time that companies that handle sensitive data, that could affect millions of users,and pay some serious attention in this direction. By incorporating ASAM, which uses the state-of-the-art Continuous Stream Mining Engine technology, that has some exceptional technical abilities, it would be a much easier way to get an overall network security snapshot. This would greatly prevent these kind of security breaches. 

Apart from keeping the network away from these breaches, there is more that one could expect out of it. First of all, there is a security snapshot of the network, that helps in grouping problems into various classes. This would enable a systematic method of solving these issues quickly and hence reduce recovery time.

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                                                              Secondly, there is a feature called the security event list box, that specifically enlists a list of offenders, targets and routing interfaces invloved at the time of occurance. Apart from this, it creates a unique event id, severity and status of incident management. This simplifies the work of the troubleshooter a great deal, thereby letting him think of solutions rather than breaking his head with identifying the problems and grouping them.

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                                             And thats not all.                                             Thirdly, there is an event details report that enlists the unique hosts, ports, protocol, tcpflags and a host of other details(which are available here)

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                                            This way the overall security aspect of the network is taken care of and it does not require too much time. A quick insight into the entire network is thus very effective in preventing breaches and this is totally something that companies need to make absolute use of to prevent such unfortunate security incidents and to keep up the good work that they are doing, at a very nominal cost. The ASAM add-on comes along with the 30-day free (trial) edition of the Netflow Analyzer 9(the latest version) which you can download from here.

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