Enhanced Network Security for Better Business Resilience

Imagine you’re the CEO of a business that relies heavily on your company’s network to keep things running smoothly. Hybrid network workflows combine both on-premise data centers and cloud environments, as well as users accessing applications from various devices and locations. All of these elements, as well as the data that passes through them, need to be protected. One day, you get a call from your IT department telling you that your network has been hacked. Panic sets in.

What do you do? Were you prepared for this? What is the financial or reputational impact to the business? Does your network have business resilience?

Why security is a pillar of business resilience

Business resilience is a critical factor in today’s fast-paced and dynamic business environment. Network performance management (NPM) plays a significant role in ensuring business resilience by managing network performance, compliance, and security. Security is one of the most crucial areas of focus for business resilience in the context of NPM. Improving your network’s security, making it more adaptable, can help it respond favorably to a rapidly evolving threat landscape. Not only will you weather potential attacks better, recovering faster and with less damage, but you may be able to avoid others altogether.

According to the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) 2023 Technology Spending Intentions Survey, 65% of IT professionals anticipate spending more on cybersecurity than any other area. Modern networks struggle to keep pace with an ever changing threat landscape. As threats and threat actors evolve and grow more sophisticated, you need a resilient hybrid network that leverages data to help your team find and fix issues faster, remediate threats, and avoid risks.

Taking steps to mitigate security risks

As this is often a daunting task for the IT organization to figure out and manage, NPM gives NetOps and SecOps teams to data and functionality to mitigate security risks. When evaluating potential NPM offerings in the context of security, identify solutions that have the following characteristics:

• In the event of a cyber attack, look for NPM products that are able to be deployed, taken down and restored to a safe state automatically having no impact to the network.
• Look for functionality like intelligent forensic analysis that can automate threat identification and reduce future risks.
• For proactive threat hunting, full-fidelity data capturing every packet, flow, and device metric in your hybrid network without sampling.
• And when finding and fixing security issues faster, look for products with anomaly detection backed by AI/ML to automate data analysis.

To build resilience into security in network performance management, businesses need to take a proactive and holistic approach. Here are some best practices:

1. Develop a comprehensive security strategy: This should include clear objectives, metrics, and processes for monitoring and ensuring security.
2. Invest in the right tools and technologies: Effective security requires the right tools, such as traditional threat prevention tools and methods as well as products that produce forensic telemetry that find threats that traditional security tools might miss. Businesses need to evaluate their needs and choose the tools that best fit their requirements.
3. Monitor and analyze network traffic: By monitoring network traffic, businesses can identify potential security threats and take action before they cause damage.

Engage intelligent security methods against cyber threats

Riverbed NPM products play a strategic role in the overall security of hybrid networks. NPM products need to be seamlessly integrated into an organization’s automated processes to remove the potential risk from manual administration.

With new features like automated orchestration, IT teams have the ability to restore Riverbed NPM products to a known safe state without manual intervention in the event of cyber-attacks or other potential internal or external network threats. In addition, the Riverbed NPM portfolio provides full fidelity data by capturing every packet, flow and device metric without sampling for forensic purposes. This helps identify potential risk exposures that traditional security tools might miss. Solid security competencies drive business resilience by reducing both the risk of negative business impacting events and the magnitude of when they occur.

For more information on business resilience and how the Riverbed Network Performance Management portfolio can help your organization, please visit this page.