Beyond firewalls: The role of network traffic monitoring in cybersecurity

In the last decade, the global adoption of the digital-first era has highly influenced technology’s role in everyday life. This era has been defined by the methods through which information and communication takes place and is exchanged.

This transformation has not only affected individual users but has also left its mark on larger economies, significantly altering the landscape of businesses. However, the downside to this growing dependence on information technology is that even a minor disruption in a system can have severe repercussions on a business network.

For businesses looking to stay secure, it’s critical for their networks to be consistently monitored. Going beyond that, businesses must ensure they adhere to data and network security standards and deliver optimal experiences to both clients and end users.

Blindspots and challenges in your network security strategies, and how you can overcome them

While most IT administrators recognize the importance of maintaining consistent network performance and effective security systems, network health is often overlooked due to network traffic and bandwidth usage not being consistently monitored. Identifying and addressing some of these oversights and challenges in your network monitoring and security strategies can take your business network’s security and health to the next level.

1. Lack of real-time visibility

With the rise in BYOD culture and hybrid networks, monitoring the performance of your network, bandwidth utilization, and overall traffic activity are the most important basic requirements for any network.

Having real-time visibility over this data—to track network devices, as well as get an in-depth view of the interfaces, applications, IPs, individual conversations, access points, servers, and every other individual network element (not limited to just business-critical devices and applications)—is crucial for ensuring you are not left blindsided by potential network traffic issues from unmonitored or unregulated devices and users.

2. Limited visibility into historic data

Real-time monitoring helps you effectively track who is using the bandwidth and prevent everyday issues and bottlenecks. But the closer you look, the less you see. Historic network traffic monitoring bridges this gap by giving network admins a bird’s-eye view of the network’s data usage trends over extended time periods. This enhances their ability to comprehensively analyze network performance and detect anomalies.

3. Challenges in proactive management

While monitoring the network traffic is a great way to track performance and issues, an efficient alerting system is what helps you get the best use of this data. This is as vital to the network as real-time monitoring in ensuring that you can isolate issues and act on them before they affect your end users.

4. Limited capacity planning

Monitoring historic network traffic data doesn’t just end at identifying bandwidth hogs, just like how effective capacity planning is not simply increasing the bandwidth capacity every time there’s an increase in traffic. An enterprise’s bandwidth need depends on various factors such as growth and the types of software they use. Historic data monitoring helps forecast bandwidth needs by enabling you to analyze network traffic and plan the short-term and long-term bandwidth requirements to avoid shortage while ensuring minimum wastage.

5. Insufficient security measures and ineffective traffic analysis

Network behavior and pattern analysis is an often overlooked part of an efficient network security system. While network traffic forensics are primarily used to keep network performance and traffic health in check, they play a huge role in ensuring network security by isolating network traffic anomalies and suspicious IPs that may have surpassed your firewall.

6. Failure to prioritize critical traffic

Most organizations fail to prioritize mission-critical applications and regulate bandwidth of sensitive media traffic, which leads to uneven distribution of bandwidth and impacts network performance. Establishing network traffic and QoS policies that are customized for your network, and periodically auditing and updating them as your network undergoes changes can help improve network performance drastically while also helping network admins gain more control over the network.

Ensuring the security of a network comes with many such challenges to network admins. However, juggling multiple tools to ensure security, network traffic health, performance, and bandwidth utilization should not be one of those challenges. With thousands of tools in the market that cater to monitoring specific parts of your network, what network admins need is a comprehensive solution that can take the load off them while helping them manage the network efficiently. ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer is one such tool that provides enterprises all the visibility into their network traffic they need to enhance network security.

Why should you consider NetFlow Analyzer for your organization?

NetFlow Analyzer is a highly-scalable, full-featured bandwidth monitoring and network traffic analysis solution for small, medium, and large-scale organizations. It is flow-based software that runs on both Windows and Linux machines and supports a wide range of devices and flow formats such as Cisco NetFlow, IPFIX, sFlow, Cflow, JFlow, FNF, and NetStream.

NetFlow Analyzer monitors your network, delivering comprehensive insights into network devices, interfaces, applications, users, bandwidth utilization, and network traffic. It analyzes network traffic patterns and trends in bandwidth usage through customizable, multi-level reports, simplifying and enhancing the efficiency of bandwidth management.

1. Gain real-time and historical traffic visibility

Create custom dashboards—with traffic charts, bandwidth trends, heatmaps, and more—to monitor the entire wireless network, including controllers; SSIDs; access points; QoS; and bandwidth usage by application, protocol, and IP address groups. Schedule and automate network traffic reports to simplify bandwidth management.

2. Traffic analysis and issue detection

Manage and track all network traffic activities, top talkers, and conversations to analyze network traffic activity and detect the root cause of network bandwidth bottlenecks and other traffic issues—all from an overview of the distributed network from a central installation.

3. Traffic forecasting and capacity planning

Forecast bandwidth usage trends with machine learning; plan bandwidth capacity trends and IT requirements ahead of time; and analyze bandwidth needs, pain points, link usage, and top applications over time.

4. Set threshold-based bandwidth usage alerts

Set multi-level alerts based on thresholds, dependencies, and severity to detect network traffic anomalies. Integrate with third-party applications to get notified on bandwidth usage violations—via chat, SMS, email, alarms, and tickets—to avoid alarm floods and enable faster response.

5. Network traffic shaping

Ensure smooth access to mission-critical applications by utilizing ACL and service policies. Monitor and audit the performance of these QoS policies with detailed usage statistics from class-based QoS reports.

6. Network security and pattern analysis

Leverage the potential of AI and ML with NetFlow Analyzer’s Pattern Analysis feature to set baselines and spot threshold deviations in real time for seamless operation. Utilize deep packet inspection and network forensics to manage bandwidth hogs and top talkers in your network. Employ the Security module, which uses predefined algorithms to analyze network traffic and identify anomalies, malware, suspicious IPs, DDoS attacks, and port scans that may have surpassed your firewall.

Trusted by thousands of network admins worldwide, NetFlow Analyzer is a complete enterprise network bandwidth monitoring solution that seamlessly integrates with various in-house and third-party solutions. It makes network traffic management more efficient and uncomplicated.

Want to learn more about how NetFlow Analyzer acts as a complete network traffic management solution? Get in touch with our product experts for a walk-through to see if it meets your requirements or download the free, 30-days trial to check it out for yourself.