Use Network Visibility to Cut Costs Now

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The Role of Network Visibility in Cost Reduction

Network visibility is a simple way to increase your organization’s bottom line, and improve your overall cybersecurity health. Datacenter visibility, network security, network performance, and cloud visibility are all opportunities for your organization to improve its bottom line. 

Faster Problem Resolution

Efficiently detecting and isolating network issues is crucial for maintaining optimal network performance and minimizing disruptions. With comprehensive network visibility tools and technologies in place, organizations can swiftly identify anomalies, bottlenecks, and potential vulnerabilities. Real-time monitoring and analysis enable prompt detection of issues such as network congestion, hardware failures, or configuration errors, allowing network administrators to address them proactively. By quickly isolating these issues, organizations can prevent their escalation into more significant problems, ensuring smooth operations, higher productivity, and enhanced user experiences.

Downtime can severely affect organizations, resulting in productivity losses, customer dissatisfaction, and financial setbacks. Network visibility is pivotal in reducing downtime and mitigating associated costs. By continuously monitoring network performance, traffic flows, and critical infrastructure components, potential issues can be identified and addressed proactively before they lead to prolonged downtime. 

Timely interventions, such as load balancing, rerouting, or hardware replacements, can be implemented based on insights gained from network visibility tools. This proactive approach minimizes service disruptions, maximizes uptime, and significantly reduces the financial impact of downtime, including loss of revenue, operational inefficiencies, and potential reputational damage.

Improved Network Performance

Bandwidth bottlenecks can significantly impact network performance and user experience, leading to sluggish connections, latency issues, and poor application performance. Network visibility enables organizations to identify and address these bottlenecks effectively. By monitoring network traffic patterns, bandwidth utilization, and application performance metrics, administrators can pinpoint areas where congestion occurs, or bandwidth is underutilized. This information allows for proactive capacity planning, optimizing network infrastructure, and implementing traffic management strategies. 

Similarly, network visibility provides valuable insights into resource allocation and utilization patterns, enabling administrators to optimize resource utilization effectively. Organizations can identify underutilized resources or areas of resource contention by monitoring network traffic, device utilization, and application performance metrics. Armed with this information, administrators can make informed decisions regarding resource allocation, capacity planning, and load balancing. This optimization of resource utilization results in enhanced efficiency, reduced costs, and improved overall network performance. Furthermore, organizations can avoid unnecessary hardware upgrades and effectively scale their networks to meet evolving demands by identifying and addressing resource inefficiencies.

Enhanced Security and Compliance

Network visibility plays a vital role by providing real-time monitoring and analysis capabilities. By continuously monitoring network traffic, security logs, and behavior patterns, organizations can detect suspicious activities, potential intrusions, or malware infections early. Advanced threat detection mechanisms like anomaly detection and behavioral analytics can leverage network visibility data to identify known and unknown threats. This proactive approach allows for prompt response, containment, and mitigation of cyber attacks before they cause significant damage. Through early detection and prevention, organizations can protect sensitive data, preserve their reputation, and minimize security breaches’ financial and operational impact.

Network visibility also provides valuable insights and capabilities to support compliance efforts. Organizations can collect and retain the data required for compliance audits and reporting by monitoring network activities. Network visibility tools help track user access, monitor data transfers, and record network events, ensuring compliance with relevant regulations and standards. Additionally, network visibility enables organizations to proactively identify and address potential compliance gaps or violations. Organizations can avoid penalties, legal consequences, and reputational damage associated with non-compliance by aligning network practices with regulatory requirements. Network visibility, therefore, is crucial in meeting regulatory obligations and maintaining a secure and compliant network environment.

Related Content: See How Network Visibility Can Pay For Itself

Best Practices for Achieving Network Visibility

There are some fundamental best practices for achieving optimal network visibility. Implementing a layered defense approach is one of them. Organizations can create overlapping barriers to protect their networks by employing multiple layers of security measures. This includes a combination of firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, encryption, access controls, and security monitoring. Each layer should be carefully configured and regularly updated to address evolving threats. This approach helps to ensure that even if one layer is breached, there are additional layers of defense to mitigate risks and protect critical assets.

Keeping network devices, applications, and software up to date with the latest security patches and updates is also crucial for maintaining a secure network environment. Vendors release patches to address vulnerabilities and security weaknesses discovered in their products. By promptly applying these patches and updates, organizations can minimize the risk of exploitation by cyber threats. Establishing a robust patch management process, including regular vulnerability assessments and patch deployments, helps organizations avoid potential security breaches and ensures that network infrastructure remains protected against known vulnerabilities.

Finally, user education and awareness are essential components of adequate network security. Employees should be trained on best practices for password management, safe browsing, phishing awareness, and social engineering tactics. Regular security awareness programs and training sessions help employees understand their role in maintaining network security and foster a security-conscious culture within the organization. By empowering users with the knowledge and skills to identify and report potential security threats, organizations can significantly reduce the risk of successful attacks and enhance the overall security posture of the network.

By focusing on network visibility, you can make the most out of your cybersecurity strategy and spend less time and money protecting your network. If you need more proof, check out our recent white paper explaining how network visibility pays for itself. 

More Information

If you want more information on this topic, check out the following resources:

• Keysight’s 2023 Security Report (report)
• Best Practices for Network Monitoring (white paper)

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