How to Maximize Monitoring ROI and Save Money in a Tough Economy

White Paper
How to Maximize Monitoring ROI and Save Money in a
Tough Economy
Expand Coverage, Optimize Tool Efficiency, and Make Management Easier for Your Staff
July 2009
White Paper How to Maximize Monitoring ROI and Save Money in a Tough Economy
ABSTRACT With every-growing threats to our uptime, security, and ongoing operations, monitoring has become a must, yet it comes with considerable difficulties. A new solution to this problem has emerged in the form of Monitoring Optimization, which helps maximize network coverage, maintain optimal utilization of hardware monitoring tools, and enable limited support staff to save considerable time and effort on an ongoing basis. This White Paper reviews the threats before us and the challenges those offer, the best way to solve these problems, and what return-on-investment can be expected for such a solution.



MONITORING IS CRITICAL As IT and Security professionals, network, security, and application monitoring has become increasingly important for a variety of reasons, including: . New Data Security and Lawful Intercept compliance requirements that mandate full monitoring coverage, rather than sampling, the most common monitoring approach before these regulations emerged . Service-Level Agreements that require a minimum level of performance and availability on important services and applications . New high-bandwidth applications such as IPTV and VoIP that must not only be monitored, but must also be delivered to the user with the packets in the correct sequence . Increased dependence on electronics communications mediums and digital business transactions, requiring minimized downtime to support revenue and other financial goals . Desire to shorten troubleshooting and disaster recovery activities without interrupting business processes or making customers aware that a problem happened in the first place . Need to increase the network operations team's productivity and to pre-empt upgrade and service needs before problems emerge Clearly, these issues are relevant to both technical and business stakeholders, so monitoring has become a core requirement for network operations and security purposes. However, this requirement presents several challenges that must be addressed to maximize return-on-investment (ROI) for monitoring.
Anue Systems, 9111 Jollyville Rd, Austin, TX 78759 P: 512-527-0453, F: 512-692-2634 www.anuesystems.com Page 2 White Paper How to Maximize Monitoring ROI and Save Money in a Tough Economy CHALLENGE #1: TOO MANY TOOLS, BUT TOO FEW DATA ACCESS POINTS To achieve all of these new objectives, your peers have had to turn to a wide variety of monitoring tools, including application monitors, IDS/IPS/IDP, VoIP Analyzers, Data Recorders, Compliance Auditors, and Protocol Analyzers ("Sniffers"), each tasked with meeting a particular monitoring need At the same time, businesses are finding themselves with a lack of available SPAN and TAP ports for mirroring data to these tools, preventing companies from attaching tools to the right access points to get the visibility the business needs. This issue comes up frequently with security and network operations teams, with the teams competing for access points to deploy their various tools. We also see this problem frequently with troubleshooting tools. Typically, this contention results in troubleshooting tools being kept offline until a problem arises. Then, when a problem does occur, the network administrators are forced to "make & break" connections, isolate and correct the problem, and then re-attach the original tool to the port. Aside from the obvious productivity impact of this situation, it results in a loss in coverage by the tool that is temporarily removed from the network. Tools such as physical layer switches and TAP replicators can allow sharing of access points by multiple tools. Howe... [download for more]