What is Network Visibility?

Understanding Network Visibility – A Complete Guide

Network visibility gives IT teams the power to monitor, manage, and secure network traffic in real time. From improving performance to enhancing security, it’s a strategic asset for any organization. In this guide, we’ll cover what network visibility is, why it matters, and how traffic filtering optimizes data flow – ensuring only the most relevant insights drive your network management.

The Evolution of Network Visibility: From Basics to Essential Infrastructure

Network visibility solutions have transformed significantly, much like mobile phones. Early TAPs and aggregation products started with simple functions – capturing network data to centralize monitoring and reduce costs. However, just as mobile phones have evolved from basic communication tools to essential, multifunctional devices, network visibility has become a crucial element in modern network management.

Expanding Beyond Basic Monitoring to Holistic Network Management

Today’s network visibility solutions provide more than just basic monitoring; they are essential for optimizing performance, ensuring security, and supporting the success of major IT initiatives. With tools like Advanced Network Packet Brokers, Probes, and Software Defined Visibility, visibility solutions are now integral to network architectures, enhancing initiatives such as:

5G/4G Service Assurance and Customer Experience Management
Data Security and Compliance
Digital Transformation and Virtualized Data Centers
Software Defined Networking and High-Performance Networks

These tools work together to eliminate network blind spots, protect sensitive data, reduce downtime, and support scalability for modern networks.

Essential Functions of Advanced Visibility Solutions

Today’s network visibility solutions deliver capabilities beyond simple TAPs and aggregation. These include:

Traffic Filtering – Reduces tool load by filtering unnecessary traffic.
Deduplication and Load Balancing – Minimizes bandwidth usage and optimizes tool efficiency.
Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) – Provides insights for security and performance analytics.
Encapsulation, Decapsulation, and Tunnel Termination – Improves interoperability across network types.
Timestamping and REGEX Search – Enhances accuracy in troubleshooting and diagnostics.

Together, these features empower organizations to effectively monitor, diagnose, and secure their networks while improving the speed and agility of IT deployments.

Supporting Business Goals with Robust Network Visibility

Network visibility tools play a critical role in helping organizations achieve business and operational objectives, such as:

Enhanced Customer Retention and Experience
Efficient Capacity Planning and Cost Management
Network Security and Business Continuity
Rapid Response to Changing Market Conditions

Through continuous advancements, visibility solutions have become essential not only for operational efficiency but also for delivering a high-quality experience to end-users and customers.

The Core Value of Modern Network Visibility Solutions

Once limited to basic monitoring, network visibility solutions now support an expansive array of functions crucial for contemporary networks. By reducing costs, optimizing tools, and supporting key initiatives, they drive business resilience and efficiency. From traffic filtering to deep packet inspection and beyond, modern network visibility solutions are the backbone of today’s network operations, ensuring performance, security, and adaptability for the future.

The Business Case for Network Visibility

In the fast-paced world of network operations, visibility solutions play a pivotal role in helping organizations achieve their IT and business goals. By ensuring optimized network performance, strengthening security, supporting network planning, and enhancing business continuity, visibility tools maximize the ROI of network infrastructure and monitoring tools. Today’s network visibility solutions have evolved from simple TAPs to more advanced components like Network Packet Brokers (NPBs), which deliver sophisticated traffic management and optimization capabilities.

Network Packet Brokers (NPBs): The Intelligence of Network Visibility

NPBs drive the advanced functions of modern visibility solutions. They eliminate blind spots, optimize and filter traffic, balance loads, and support high-speed connections of up to 400 Gbps. These capabilities enhance network monitoring, security, and analytics, making NPBs fundamental for major IT initiatives like 5G service assurance, digital transformation, data security, and high-performance networking.

Reducing Costs and Maximizing ROI of Network Tools

Network tools – whether for monitoring, security, or analytics – often come with pricing based on capacity or usage. NPBs maximize tool efficiency by filtering and optimizing network traffic through deduplication, packet slicing, and aggregation, which allows network tools to process only essential data. For example, Cubro’s deployment for a financial institution reduced Intrusion Detection System (IDS) costs by 50% through NPB traffic optimization, cutting down required IDS ports while maintaining effective monitoring.

Lowering Downtime Costs with Enhanced Visibility

Network downtime can be extremely costly. Gartner reports an average downtime cost of $5,600 per minute, or over $300K per hour. Network visibility solutions, which remove blind spots that obscure performance risks, significantly reduce these costs. In many cases, a single hour of prevented downtime can justify the cost of deploying a visibility solution, delivering a fast and substantial ROI.

Improving Security Posture and Reducing Breach Costs

The IBM/Ponemon report for 2021 highlights the high cost of data breaches, with an average incident costing $4.24M. Enhanced visibility helps organizations detect vulnerabilities early and prevent breaches, which not only reduces financial losses but also mitigates reputational damage. Visibility solutions have thus become essential for robust security postures, offering strong ROI by helping prevent costly security incidents.

A Strategic Investment in Business Continuity

As network demands grow with the deployment of initiatives like SDN, virtualized data centers, and high-speed connections, network visibility has become critical for maintaining smooth and secure operations. Visibility solutions, such as those offered by Cubro, combine advanced features with competitive pricing, delivering essential support for performance, security, and efficiency.

Network Traffic Filtering: What Has It Ever Done for Us?

Beyond enhancing network performance, boosting security posture, and powering analytics, network traffic filtering brings even more significant benefits: it lowers infrastructure and tool costs, reduces total cost of ownership, extends the lifespan and ROI of network tools, increases tool efficiency, minimizes tool sprawl, and contributes to IT sustainability—all while preserving the integrity of the original network traffic. 😊

As discussed in previous sections, deploying a Network Packet Broker (NPB) within network visibility solutions allows organizations to achieve these objectives. Traffic filtering by an NPB reduces the load on network tools, optimizing their effectiveness, efficiency, and longevity.

How Out-of-Band Traffic Filtering Works

Boosting Security Tool Efficiency with Network Traffic Filtering

Traffic filtering also manages encrypted traffic that needs special handling before analysis. For instance, encrypted packets can be routed to a decryption solution before they reach the monitoring tool, or in some cases, the NPB may decrypt the data directly. NPBs capable of multiple filtering types can simultaneously manage diverse streams at high speeds, routing each filtered stream to the appropriate tools for analysis.

In other scenarios, traffic filtering enhances security tool performance. If certain application traffic, like encrypted Netflix data, poses a low security risk due to verified origins and destinations, this traffic can be filtered out while sending all other data to security tools for detailed analysis. This targeted filtering significantly reduces the load on security tools, improving their efficiency.

In short, network traffic filtering minimizes the amount of traffic tools must process, streamlines their functions, reduces costs, extends tool lifespan, and boosts sustainability—all crucial reasons why network traffic filtering is a game-changer for network management today!

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