Despite the pace of IT innovation, there is still no one network tool that does everything well. As a result, companies need to layer their security tools to build the most robust line of defense and response protocols, like network traffic control.
Addressing your visibility issues alone isn’t enough— if you do not configure all your components seamlessly, then your security posture suffers. You need to find a monitoring solution that integrates well with the preexisting network devices and tools you have in place.
Integration should not compromise your security or performance.
Unlike single-vendor solutions that only integrate with other devices that a particular vendor produces, Gigamon is an all-inclusive visibility and network traffic control solution architected to integrate seamlessly with a broad spectrum of environments.
Gain Visibility and Network Traffic Control without Rearchitecting Your Network
The beauty of Gigamon is that it doesn’t change how you design your networks, but it does give you a great deal of power and flexibility by enabling you to logically alter your network topology without requiring a massive re-architecture of your networks.
Gigamon enables you to design your edge router, IPS, anti-malware, Firewall, and LAN first—you don’t have to worry about compatibility. In most other scenarios (and with other monitoring companies), you would have to build your infrastructure with complex routing to circumnavigate for failures. Alternatively, Gigamon makes this routing process seamless because it acts as the universal traffic cop by providing dynamic routing changes even to “inline” devices.
Through Gigamon’s automation features, you can set up an inline bypass automatically so that if a device becomes unresponsive, Gigamon will reroute and bypass the downed device on the fly. (e.g. if an IPS is down for maintenance, you can have Gigamon route around this without needing to manage or build in further complex routing changes).
How Does This Differ from a Load Balancer?
While a load balancer balances traffic between servers, Gigamon balances, directs, and mirrors traffic between network devices. Gigamon sends designated network traffic to different devices in real-time based on information found in the packet header. This is accomplished using Gigamon’s intelligent, scalable technology offered as part of GigaVUE OS, Flow Mapping® takes line-rate traffic at 1Gb, 10Gb, 40Gb or 100Gb from a network tap or a SPAN/mirror port (physical or virtual) and sends it through a set of user-defined map rules to the tools and applications that secure, monitor, and analyze IT infrastructure.
Gigamon also resolves certain device limitations by automatically routing traffic to your WAF, traffic spanner, etc. For example, if you had an inline security tool with a 1Gb port, Gigamon works at 10Gb and spool the data for the security tool, sending only the information necessary (e.g. web traffic)—no matter what vendor you have for your WAF.
For the concerned among you, Gigamon doesn’t have to alter the flow of traffic. If you choose, you can implement Gigamon to non-invasively listen to your networks, giving you visibility without impacting logical flow or performance.
How Deep Visibility Enables Better Security
Encrypted traffic creates a black box that can literally tunnel dangerous data right into the heart of your data center. If your existing monitoring tool cannot decrypt traffic (or it’s overly performance-taxing to do so), Gigamon steps in to decrypt your network traffic and forward it to your scanning tools. There, it can be re-encrypted (or not depending on your configuration) and sent back down the line—all without slowing your traffic or processes.
Gigamon scales with your network both inside your data center and into the public cloud to eliminate your blind spots and provide direct network traffic control across all of your traffic.
What About Other Practical Uses?
As if the features above weren’t enough, Gigamon can free up your network in a variety of interesting ways. Gigamon also enables a variety of creative use cases:
- Gigamon mirrors your traffic to any of the devices in your networks This enables you to perform true PoCs between competing devices by mirroring live network traffic to multiple devices at the same time. This way your tests aren’t reliant on similar traffic, you can verify with the same exact traffic across every device. And this applies to any type of network tool without requiring rearchitecture or special configurations; you just plug it into Gigamon and you tell it what you need.
- Gigamon does analysis at true line rate, and its analytics do nothing to slow your traffic down; they analyze at the natural speed of your traffic, both in and out. Just because you have a 10Gb port doesn’t mean that the ASICs can keep up with that level of traffic. Some vendors will claim line rate, but that will work in practice if only a single device is attached; every additional device reduces the throughput. However, with Gigamon, every port has a dedicated ASIC so that it can provide full 10Gb across every port—even if they’re all in use.
Gigamon Enables Visibility and Control
“Out of sight, out of mind” is one of the most dangerous positions to be in when it comes to monitoring and maintaining your environments. It’s time to implement a better solution—one that doesn’t hamper your existing network components, but instead, makes them better.
