Cool new network traffic analysis tools help secure data
It's a simple truth: Better network visibility enables better network security. The more you know about what's happening on your network, the better prepared you will be to prevent, detect and thwart attacks.
Network traffic analysis techniques have long been used by IT professionals to tune enterprise network performance and optimize network bandwidth usage. But a new class of network traffic analysis tools, wielding machine learning and other advanced technologies, is increasingly used to analyze network packet data in order to determine what "normal" network traffic behavior should look like and, as a result, to identify potentially malicious network traffic.
Enterprise network traffic analytics offers defenders an ever-expanding source of data, some of it legitimate, some of it malicious, that can be mined in order to gather information about how the network should be used -- and how to identify when the network is being abused.
Network data traffic analytics can enable defenders to more accurately identify the malicious packets almost as fast as attackers can send them. Analytics can also more quickly mitigate threats while isolating the network segments that are under attack to prevent the attack from spreading.
Like so many new developments in information security, using network data traffic analytics for improving security is not a panacea and can't replace using a broad spectrum approach to security depth, but it does offer enterprises another important strategy in their cybersecurity defenses. In this handbook, networking and security specialists offer actionable intelligence for understanding and evaluating the benefits that network traffic analysis for data security can provide.
