As companies have shifted their employee workspace environments from the office to a “work from anywhere” model, the security perimeter has extended to cover remote users, data centers, SaaS applications, IaaS applications and more. In modern distributed environments, it’s common to have at least three different WAN routing options for traffic: direct to internet, corporate VPN, and Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB). There are often routing rules in place where business applications use one route, such as the CASB, while other applications go direct to internet. The route used can have a significant impact on application performance and user experience.
With adoption growing quickly, Zero Trust Network Architectures (ZTNA) like SASE and Security Service Edge (SSE) enable users to securely access to their applications, devices, data, etc. wherever they are located. For companies, this means that a threat can be easily contained and isolated in the event of a breach. The problem is that the tunnels that secure the data also reduce visibility and add monitoring and troubleshooting complexity.
ITOps teams can no longer look into traffic directly within these environments. As the traffic enters a Zscaler or Netskope tunnel, for example, it gets combined and homogenized. As a result, IT loses the detail it needs to identify where slowdowns are occurring and what is causing them.
Riverbed IQ observes Zero Trust environments
Riverbed IQ Unified Observability leverages end user experience metrics plus advanced logic and correlation to deliver much needed visibility into Zero Trust environments. By viewing the application traffic before it enters the VPN or CASB gateways, IT can now monitor and troubleshoot access and performance issues.
When problems occur, Riverbed IQ surfaces performance indicators, including valuable context about the scope, severity, and probable root cause. Key measurements that Riverbed IQ uses include:
- Which applications are having performance issues?
- Which users are impacted? Are there users who are not impacted?
- Which locations are impacted?
- How severe is the impact?
- How are the impacted users accessing the application? (CASB, VPN, etc.)
- Is the issue caused by a specific ISP?
- Is the VPN or gateway causing the problem?
Watch this video to learn more about how Riverbed IQ works in Zero Trust environments.
Riverbed IQ for the win
Providing IT teams with the means to troubleshoot problems within today’s modern architecture is not always easy. Many organizations resort to synthetic testing, but this only lets you know there’s a problem. It does not provide root cause details.
Riverbed IQ delivers the unified observability that IT teams need to diagnose and resolve new blind spots by integrating and correlating user experience data from Riverbed Aternity. IT teams can now determine where problems reside, who is impacted, and problem severity. Armed with this information, they can now troubleshoot previously difficult-to-diagnose issues in hybrid work and Zero Trust environments.