4 Core Pillars for Complete Network Visibility
Gaining deep visibility into network behavior is not something that “just happens”– it requires careful planning, monitoring, and management to continually fine-tune optimizations and improve network health. Network visibility should provide a complete picture of everything that’s happening on a network at any given time.
There are four key elements necessary to achieve complete visibility: discovery and mapping, asset management, performance monitoring, and application visibility.
Comprehensive network visibility is crucial for securing IoT devices, particularly as network-connected device fleets continue to scale across use cases and industries—from healthcare to manufacturing to other critical infrastructure. CTOs must ensure that their security and IT teams can see every IoT device on their network at all times; you can’t protect what you can’t see. Unfortunately, as headlines continue to show, the IoT network visibility problem is widespread: Forrester recently reported that most organizations do not know how many IoT devices are on their networks.
Next-level visibility can be attained using tools that show all the vital signs about network traffic and performance. This includes monitoring applications, devices, users, and network resources. But before developing a plan for network visibility, here are some pointers and questions to consider:
Network Devices and Network Users: The network you manage is there for one reason—to provide services to all its connected devices and users. But who are the users of your network? And what devices are they using?
Unmanaged IoT devices—those outside the network management capabilities of traditional IT tools—are soft targets for attackers and must be more highly prioritized by CTOs. Active network scanners often overlook IoT devices, preventing teams from effectively protecting them or addressing their vulnerabilities.
Network Traffic: For complete network visibility, you need to understand the sources coming into your network, as well as the outward traffic destinations. How are applications being routed through your network? Is the traffic taking the path you’d expect?
Network Performance: From baseline to bottlenecks, it’s essential to see how your network and its hardware are performing at any given time, as well as over time.
Application Monitoring: What applications are being used in the network? What applications are using a lot of your network resources? Are those applications doing what they are supposed to?
Network Resources and Analytics Management: Metrics and reporting are critical parts of planning and budgeting for network improvements.
You will need to gather a clear picture of all these data points because you can’t address what you can’t see. If you’re not aware of what’s happening from moment to moment across the network, then you will remain in a reactive state – always fixing things after they break rather than taking preventative steps to minimize the chances of emergencies. And when problems do occur, that lack of visibility will lead to further downtime and bad end-user experiences because troubleshooting becomes much harder.
Network admins should create clear plans with network visibility tools built upon these four core pillars:
1. Network Discovery and Mapping
Network administrators must gain a detailed understanding of the devices on their network, how those devices are connected, and the network topology. Troubleshooting is much easier with up-to-date network documentation. Network topology maps help with planning for future network updates. For instance, when you’re notified that a device is at its end-of-support or end-of-life and it’s time to be replaced, you may ask, “How important is this device, anyway?” Knowing what users, services, and devices rely on that piece of infrastructure will provide greater context to plan for the replacement.
According to Larry Lunetta, "Insight into what is happening on the network is critical to protect devices and users, especially as enterprise AI data and assets increasingly become attack targets. One area of particular focus is IoT data, which is growing in significance in filling data lakes for training AI models, and requires enhanced visibility and identification of devices connected to the network and continuous monitoring for unusual or rogue behavior.”
2. Network Asset Management
Network asset management goes deeper than simply a list of devices. A network asset inventory provides context on each of those devices, including critical components, serial numbers, lifecycle and end of life information, among other things. Such an inventory also creates clear visibility into device information, users on the network, applications, and all endpoints. This knowledge about network assets provides needed context to guide resource planning and make security improvements.
3. Performance Monitoring and Management
With total network visibility, the goal isn’t just to see the devices but to see into them as well. At all times, you should have a view of the overall performance of the network, including the health of the hardware driving that network. Performance monitoring should be customized to provide key details about the hardware being monitored. Many performance interfaces can show live and historical data of key changes in state.
For example, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) dashboard will provide a graph showing past power outages. A hypervisor dashboard will provide historical data about bandwidth, data usage, and packets per second.
Shankar Somasundaram notes that "Network visibility is crucial for effective risk prioritization. CTOs should ensure their teams have detailed IoT device inventories with accurate classification to yield insights into each device’s type, connectivity protocol, and application domain. Harnessing capabilities such as protocol analyzers, deep packet inspection (DPI), and traffic analysis with AI/ML can help teams detect new devices and assess each device’s real risk profile based on its specific use case.”
4. Application and Traffic Visibility
Just as performance monitoring allows us to see into the devices we’re monitoring, application and traffic visibility allows us to understand network usage patterns.“Deployment automation and network reliability are closely tied to visibility. Having a centralized platform helps increase network assurance and ensure business continuity by monitoring for network failures and platform availability.” -Larry Lunetta
Other benefits include ongoing performance monitoring and application visibility to get a fuller understanding of network traffic patterns and flows. By going beyond simple collection of flow data, and instead analyzing that flow data with pattern recognition and machine learning, we can uncover critical details about how the network is really being used.
Comprehensive asset management should serve as the foundation for accurate network documentation, including mapping and discovery of all devices. From there, the powerful advantages of complete network visibility include improved network management and centralized documentation, along with application monitoring that leads to faster troubleshooting and stronger security. All of which provides better information and greater context for future network planning as well.
Achieving complete network visibility is an ongoing initiative that needs to be annually reviewed. Once you start on this journey by putting some processes and tools in place, don’t stop there. To maintain ongoing network visibility, keep reviewing those processes and tools on a regular basis to continually improve your view of all activities happening across your network. By upholding the four core pillars for network visibility, you can maintain a more robust, dependable, and secure network over time.
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