The New Network Reality

Replacing Netfort LANguardian

Kemp and Flowmon solutions are ideal replacements for Netfort LANguardian solutions that have recently entered their end-of-life support phase. The planned replacement of Netfort LANguardian with Flowmon solutions will be a project that delivers better network monitoring, better application performance, and increased reliability. Organisations with end-of-life Netfort LANguardian solutions will need to replace them soon. A perfect opportunity to switch to Flowmon. Also, an opportunity to look to deploy Kemp LoadMaster to deliver the best application experience at the same time.

The enforced remote working that many businesses have implemented over the last year has increased the pressures on IT professionals tasked with maintaining services, applications, and networks. Almost overnight, connections to on-premise and cloud-based applications came from hundreds or thousands of new endpoint locations. This increased the surface area available to attackers and also the chances of failures. As a result, the risk to services and efficient operations also increased.

In addition to this sudden move to remote working, there is also a general trend for networks to become more diverse and abstract, with components spread over multiple cloud providers and private data centers. It's almost impossible for human network and security professionals to fully understand these diverse networks. But they must be monitored in real-time to ensure smooth operations and to deliver the cybersecurity required today.

Network Detection and Response (NDR) tools are often deployed to monitor the network traffic coming from disparate sources. These tools are comprehensive and provide good information that helps keep applications responsive and secure. But NDR tools tend to do a full packet capture of the data streams on the network, which quickly leads to issues with the amount of data captured, its storage, and the computing resources needed to analyze it in real-time. For example, capturing a throughput of 250 Mbps on average equals a data size of 1.8 GB per minute, which adds up to 108 GB per hour and 2.6 TB a day. On modern 10Gbps networks, it's possible to get to data capture and storage amounts in the range of 100TB! A significant undertaking even if the data is stored for short periods. And short storage periods with rapid deletion mean that historical information is not available for deep analysis of events that come to light after the data is gone.

Capturing Flow Data

Flow data gathering and analysis provide real-time network monitoring and analysis without the considerable storage requirements of NDR. Rather than collecting all packets, a NetFlow Collector records the source and destination IP address and port for each network interaction. The duration of the communication and the number of bytes transferred is also recorded and stored. The actual data packets are not stored. Flow data recording can be understood with an analogy to telephone calls. Records are kept of calls that are made and how long the calls lasted. But the contents of the calls are not stored.

Recording flow data instead of full packet data reduces the amount of data stored for network monitoring. Typical reductions are on the order of 500:1 over full packet analysis. This means that only 0.2% of the storage is required, and the network monitoring data can be retained for extended periods to allow for analysis further into the future. Experience shows that it is possible to analyze and troubleshoot 95% of all network incidents that need investigation by collecting flow data. For the other 5% of cases, packet analysis can be enabled when required to capture the data packets.

Kemp and Flowmon

Kemp already delivers industry-leading load balancers that enable the best application experience in the cloud, on-premise, and across hybrid deployments. Kemp has identified synergies between load balancing and flow data-based network monitoring and has acquired Flowmon to drive the synergies in this area. Flowmon's network-layer root-cause analysis complements LoadMaster's ability to understand the application itself. It delivers intelligence on performance degradation with root cause analysis in real-time. Flowmon also expands LoadMaster's web application firewall security to the whole digital environment. Covering not only the application delivery chain but also both north-south and east-west network traffic. This allows the detection and response to events like lateral data movement, data collection, command & control commands, or data exfiltration. This effectively turns the network into another layer of protection against cyber threats and ensures that applications are delivered in a secure environment across the whole infrastructure landscape.

Find Out More

Renaissance is the Kemp partner in the Ireland market. We can supply the entire range of Kemp LoadMaster and Kemp Flowmon products. Contact us today to find out more about both and how you can migrate to these industry-leading solutions.