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| A C-level insight |
 
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| How Distributed Taps create Competitive Advantage: |
What C-levels Need to Know!
C-LEVELS HAVE MANY REASONS TO LOSE SLEEP THESE DAYS. Regulations and internal corporate standards are increasing in stringency, touching on everything from personal accountability to data availability and audits. Market pressures are mounting for networks to perform competitively, meaning more bandwidth and less downtime. And, as always, there are performance criteria where more needs to be achieved on less.
In this new era, information reigns supreme among corporate assets. While cash was once King, C-levels now know that information is the corporation's most critical asset. Information resides on the corporate network! Without a secure and efficient network, this asset is at risk and its return on investment is failing. Only with network management can information be secured and only through monitoring can network management be enabled. However, accomplishing a network monitoring solution that satisfies current market and regulatory demands can be no small feat-it's expensive, it's personnel intensive and it's distributed.
VSS monitoring heralds a new paradigm in network monitoring. Never before has it been possible to monitor so extensively with such limited investment. In particular, VSS monitoring presents to C-levels its line of Distributed Solutions - Remotely managed, Filtered, Aggregator Taps, independent of monitoring software, that, when placed in combination, deliver outstanding coverage and unprecedented cost savings and incident response times.
VSS monitoring's Distributed Taps enable regulatory compliance and accountability to investors, customers and patients. They improve visibility and response time which saves lives and enables competitive performance. And they lower network monitoring costs by up to 80%. - Distributed Taps turn compliance and other rudimentary networking objectives into competitive advantage.
To fully appreciate the benefits of deploying Distributed Taps in any network monitoring architecture, it is important to understand the current state of network monitoring and the demands that C-levels face in drafting network monitoring solutions.
The Challenges
Regulatory Pressures
Every industry is subject to some form of regulation regarding information breach and accountability: HIPAA tightly regulates the Healthcare industry, Gramm-Leach-Bliley affects deployments in the financial sector, and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulates the security and management of financial data of all publicly traded companies. Other regulations such as the European Union's Basel II and US state breach laws affect every industry operating within certain regions. The general regulatory climate is that companies (and, in many cases, its executive officers) are fully responsible for the effect their networks have on the privacy and accessibility of customer / patient / investor information.
Not all attacks can be avoided; however, every industry must take steps to ensure that should an attack occur, its nature-whose information has been affected and to what extent-and its source will be known. Like it or not, the only way to enable accountability for stolen or compromised data is through a comprehensive network monitoring solution.
Performance Expectations
Competitive performance can hold vastly different meanings for different industries. For the healthcare industry, the response time to downed networks that supply vital information can mean life or death for a patient and for this reason performance levels are of primary concern. For Telecommunication firms, the frequency of dropped calls and the response time to downed networks can not only be a billings nightmare but may precipitate a proportional drop in customers. Every industry must stake its future on its competitive performance and in the world of the 'information highway' a greater part of that future will depend on the competitive performance of its network.
High Cost of Monitoring
Current network monitoring architectures are software driven - a very expensive proposition that requires IT managers to deploy multiple monitoring tools throughout their network and pay heavy licensing and annual maintenance fees just to maintain an already inflated solution. In order to comply with current and future regulations and keep customers and investors happy with secure and reliable dataflow, companies must demand solutions that enable comprehensive and manageable monitoring solutions - without breaking the bank. Such a demand calls for innovations in hardware, whereby software can be more fully leveraged.
Turning Challenges into Opportunities
VSS monitoring's distributed data collection tools are turning network monitoring challenges into market opportunities. Enabling 100% visibility and ensuring stealth from intruders, VSS monitoring's remotely managed network taps enable immediate response times while slashing the overall monitoring costs by up to 80%.
Creating Total Network Visibility
For a network monitoring solution to be properly effective, it must allow for total visibility of all critical links and enable immediate responses to any network disruption.
VSS monitoring's customers, from a variety of industries, have achieved greater visibility throughout their network by deploying Distributed Taps in each network location which allows all connected links to be aggregated to remote, centralized management site. IT managers can then choose to view one, all or any combination of links through point-and-click port selection.
Network monitoring solutions that are driven by Distributed Taps enable regulatory compliance by providing a viable way to create comprehensive and penetrating network monitoring coverage.
Enabling Immediate Response Times
Ideally, every link in your network would be Tapped and remotely monitored to facilitate immediate visibility and immediate troubleshooting. Most IT managers believe, however, that the only way to accomplish this level of monitoring coverage is through the deployment of more monitoring tools. But even assuming that your networking budget is large enough to accommodate the involved costs, there is still the problem of management. More monitoring tools in more locations means there must be more personnel to manage the resultant data. Distributed Taps solve both problems of management and costs. They enable more monitoring with less monitoring infrastructure, and they solve administrative concerns by allowing all networks to be seamlessly managed from a remote location with as little as one monitoring tool. A single monitoring tool would be able to instantly look into any or all networks connected to it, enabling immediate response and troubleshooting. The opportunity to have every appropriate network link accessible for immediate troubleshooting lowers network downtime and ensures exceptional performance levels.
Reducing Costs
Most networks can stand the use of additional monitoring coverage, especially considering the role information security plays in most industries. But one common mistake that companies make is prematurely investing in a network monitoring solution that is ultimately impractical and unaffordable, requiring too many personnel to manage and too many fees to warrant its initial costs. There is no reason to lavishly invest in what is after all an insurance policy, albeit one that must be held. Monitoring tools that enable regulatory compliance and competitive performance can be significantly leveraged when deployed in combination with Distributed Taps.
The opportunity to monitor multiple remote networks with a single monitoring server offers enormous costs savings to the end user. Not only will this deployment scenario enable unprecedented savings on monitoring equipment and software licensing, but it will allow IT efforts to be centralized and streamlined, virtually eliminating the need for onsite visits by IT personnel.
Even enterprises with an established network monitoring infrastructure can significantly benefit from the deployment of Distributed Taps. For example, span ports have become a ubiquitous way to monitor networks. Rather than replace this existing infrastructure, span ports can be leveraged to gain more monitoring coverage with fewer monitoring tools. Traditional deployments require a monitoring tool interface for every span port but with Distributed Taps a single device would enable visibility into every link connected to every Switch in the network with only a single, remotely located monitoring tool.
Achieving Competitive Advantage
Securing and optimizing the network across your entire organization can be a significant challenge. Creating a comprehensive, remotely managed and cost-effective network monitoring solution doesn't have to be. VSS monitoring's proprietary distributed taps change the architecture of network monitoring from software driven applications that require multiple tools, heavy license fees and annual maintenance to a more streamlined approach that highly leverages each monitoring server and enables total visibility of the network links from a remote and central location.
Reducing the risk to investors in ways critical to the network and their information upkeep is an opportunity for the financial institution to create competitive advantage, particularly if doing so is approximately 80% less expensive than a competing bank. Improving the emergency response systems in healthcare is equally opportunistic in reducing risk and insurance premiums while creating a safer and less expensive information visibility system that competing entities.
The C-level might now appreciate that compliance to industry regulations and internal corporate standards should no longer be considered a burden but an opportunity to achieve competitive advantage. They may also realize that this advantage is not complete without the use of a centrally monitored distributed data collection system, independently deployed of the monitoring tools. Such a system as that provided by VSS monitoring, Inc. enabling pervasive information visibility, immediate response times with cost savings up to 80% of alternative deployments.
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