Blog :: NPMD

Why collaboration between NetOps and SecOps is so important today

Several factors are driving massive changes in the relationship between NetOps and SecOps teams—or NetSecOps. Traditionally, network operations and security operations teams were siloed, with NetOps handling network maintenance, management, and orchestration, while SecOps focused on network and endpoint security. 

But a number of trends are driving increased collaboration between these two teams and fostering growing adoption of NetSecOps practices, including: 

  • Both teams need data about the network to do their jobs—and that data is the same regardless of which team is using it. 
  •  Collaboration enables both teams to spend less time reacting to issues and more time preventing problems—both of which improve network performance. 
  • Collaboration also enables both teams to respond to and mitigate threats faster than siloed teams.  
  • Additionally, collaboration promotes better policy compliance and enforcement. 
  • Integrated NetSecOps teams eliminate redundancies, delivering capital and operational cost savings. 
  • Every enterprise suffers from a lack of skilled workers on both NetOps and SecOps teams. NetSecOps provides the opportunity to cross-train staff and mitigate the impact of the skills gap. 

Overall, NetSecOps has the potential to improve business agility, ensure pervasive network visibility, and introduce much-needed changes to enterprise networks. 

How to foster a NetSecOps environment 

While the benefits of a NetOps and SecOps collaboration are undoubtedly attractive, achieving a unified environment can be challenging. One way enterprises are doing so is by using network performance and diagnostic (NPMD) tools as a collaboration point. 

 
NPMD is used to monitor network and application behavior continually and detect abnormalities that impact network performance, scalability, and availability. By enabling NetOps and SecOps to diagnose the root cause of anomalies on the network, NPMD provides the details necessary for comprehensive network and device visibility. Knowing what is on the network and how those devices and interfaces are behaving is crucial to maintaining a strong and secure network. 

Not surprisingly, NPMD solutions are not all up to the task. Gartner’s 2020 magic quadrant for NPMD featured solutions from more than 20 companies—and new ones have been added since. As such, it’s important to understand the key differences between these solutions before choosing a vendor. 

The Plixer NPMD platform has many unique features that set it apart, including: 

  • Device Discovery: Understand what types of devices are on your network, device locations, and behavior in real-time. Track assets scattered across your entire enterprise and gather an accurate view of all network devices.
  • Device Profiling: Because Plixer’s NPMD platform collects and analyzes data from a wide variety of sources, it can categorize devices using thousands of predefined device profiles, reducing dependence upon manually intensive, time-consuming processes, which then frees staff to focus on core business tasks.
  • Risk Assessment: The Plixer NPMD platform calculates a summary risk score and breaks out vulnerabilities into four distinct categories: operating-system-related risks, device-related risks, communications-related risks, and risks identified by external endpoint management/security solutions. 
  • Application Performance Monitoring: Network and application optimizations and root cause analysis require true end-to-end visibility. By collecting, visualizing, and reporting on data that extends all the way from the user to the cloud, Plixer’s NPMD provides real-time detection to minimize disruption. 
  • Contextual Data to Identify Root Cause: Through visualization of every conversation from Layers 2-7, the Plixer NPMD platform then correlates network-related data with metadata collected from firewalls, IDS/IPS, SIEM, and distributed probes. Root cause analysis then instantly identifies the user, device, location, protocol, and application data for every flow on the network. 
  • Faster Time-to-Resolution: Fast problem resolution requires you to easily correlate a user’s traffic with jitter, latency, and QoS misconfigurations, as well as network, server, and application response times. Rapid root cause analysis provides you with end-to-end visibility and easy-to-read reports on the essential data elements.

We’ve recently developed a new whitepaper that provides a much deeper dive into these issues and more. Access your copy of The Plixer Network Performance Monitoring And Diagnostic Platform white paper or schedule a demo today.