Rubber Bands, Bad Apples and Automated Orchestration

As modern networks stretch well beyond the data center, vulnerabilities are being exploited more and more by threat actors. Much like a rubber band, as you stretch it out and pull it tighter, there is always the risk of it breaking.

When networks were confined to just the data center, it was easier to monitor. But now that networks stretch significantly outside the data center—all the way to the campus, remote office or cloud—the threats to the network become more prevalent because your rubber band is stretched to its limits. In doing so, keeping your distributed network compliant and secure is a challenge.

Beware bad apples

Bad actors are always trying to exploit those vulnerabilities in the far stretched network. It only takes the baddies one time to find their way into a network by running a corrupt file, non-compliant application or old operating system. If an application or OS is out of compliance, no longer supported, or is riddled with security issues, this can translate to serious loss of productivity, customer sentiment and revenue. In addition, a company can end up paying millions in fines and can have additional financial impact just in the recovery process alone.

Many highly regulated industries like finance, government or medical are trying to police themselves when it comes to such issues of compliance and security. It’s better to monitor themselves and hold their businesses up to a higher standard instead of the government passing major regulations that cause wide sweeping change, often at great expense to the business. Government regulation is often a last resort so better to look after yourselves. If the government gets involved, it’s often due to a catastrophic event propagated by a single vendor effecting a client and millions of their customers. And those regulations ultimately could impact every network vendor in that particular industry.

One bad apple can financially ruin the apple cart for all parties involved.

Secure networks with Alluvio NPM

Riverbed’s Alluvio Network Performance Management (NPM) portfolio recently implemented a feature enhancement across its products as a result of regulated institutions requiring this change of all their vendors. In response to the prevalence of Ransomware attacks happening across various sectors, industry leaders mandated their vendors who operated products within their networks to implement what Riverbed calls Automated Orchestration.

This recent feature integrated across Alluvio AppResponse, NetProfiler, NetIM and Portal allows any of these products to be stood up; and in the event of an internal or external threat, have the product taken down and redeployed automatically to a known safe state. This in turn saves time, money and mitigates risks associated with manual intervention. Automated Orchestration across your NPM portfolio will ensure compliance as well as security so that your network keeps running and avoid the risk of potential fines or negative financial impact.

For more information on the Alluvio NPM portfolio of products, please visit this page.