Large organizations face a host of challenges in managing their digital ecosystems, spanning from cybersecurity and data protection to performance and availability issues. Without proper visibility, organizations can struggle to identify and mitigate these challenges, leading to costly and potentially devastating consequences. Thankfully, a new solution has emerged that can help companies gain the visibility they need to manage their assets and users effectively.
The Need for Scalable, Consistent, Real-Time Visibility
Large organizations need a scalable, consistent, and real-time visibility that spans all their assets and users. With the proliferation of endpoints and the increasing complexity of networks, it’s not always easy to see what’s happening across an organization’s operations. Thus, a visibility platform becomes a critical tool, allowing organizations to monitor and analyze their digital ecosystems in real-time.
The growing complexity, unmanageability, and vulnerability of digital ecosystems
The more indispensable a company becomes, the more complex, unmanageable, and vulnerable its digital ecosystem becomes. This is especially true when an organization is forced to use multiple tools to manage various parts of its operations. As an organization adds more components to its IT infrastructure, it becomes more challenging to keep track of everything, and the risk of an attack increases as well.
The increasing attack surface as data and compute resources move to the edge
As more data and compute resources move to the edge of an organization’s operations, the attack surface increases. Remote working, IoT, and cloud computing have all expanded that surface area. Thus, a visibility platform can provide real-time inspection of incoming and outgoing traffic, helping companies detect potential threats quickly.
Multiplying challenges in performance, security, and availability, including DDoS attacks
Performance, security, availability, and DDoS challenges are multiplying and are often interconnected and overlapping. A visibility platform can help organizations monitor their network traffic, identify the root cause of performance issues, and predict where potential security threats might occur.
The Importance of Adopting a Modern, Automated, and Visibility-Driven Platform Approach
It becomes clear that large enterprises need to adopt a modern, automated, and visibility-driven platform approach to detect, investigate, and resolve these types of problems. Such an approach can help organizations break down the barriers between teams and ensure everyone is working from the same page when addressing issues.
Seven Key Attributes of an Effective Visibility Platform
To be effective, it must operate across seven key attributes. A visibility platform needs to provide accurate real-time and historical visibility, deliver actionable alerts, integrate seamlessly with existing solutions, support a centralized management platform, provide scalable data storage, offer detailed protocol analysis, and provide a customizable user experience.
The need for deep-dive, protocol-level analysis and forensic evidence collection
Visibility is essential in the present, but a visibility platform must be capable of performing deep dives, protocol-level analysis, and forensic evidence collection using either real-time data captures or historical data mining. In doing so, organizations can resolve complex issues that may be difficult to diagnose.
The Importance of Contextual Metadata in Encouraging Collaboration
A visibility platform that extracts contextual metadata from data packets creates a shared source of objective information that encourages collaboration across network and application teams. Multiple teams can work together and share expertise to address issues and improve operations.
In conclusion, large enterprises need to invest in a visibility platform as the only sensible path forward. The challenges of managing increasingly complex and vulnerable digital ecosystems won’t go away anytime soon, and without the right tools, companies will struggle to address them. A visibility platform can help organizations gain deep insights into their digital operations, quickly detect and diagnose issues, and improve collaboration between teams. By adopting this approach, large organizations can continue to grow and succeed, even in the ever-evolving digital landscape.