TURN THE TAP ON

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND CLOUD COMPUTING HAVE CHANGED THE BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE, BRINGING AN ENHANCED FOCUS ON NETWORK SECURITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE. A NETWORK TAP CAN BE A KEY IMPLEMENTATION TO OPTIMISE UPTIME AND PROTECT AGAINST BREACHES. TONY ROBINSON RCDD CDCDP CNIDP, GLOBAL MARKET DEVELOPMENT MANAGER, CORNING OPTICAL COMMUNICATIONS, EXPLAINS HOW.

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The move into cloud in recent years for businesses has been quick and wholesale. There are advantages to be gained from shifting core business systems and applications into the cloud, but this move must come with the robust security to match. Disrupted services or data breaches could be catastrophic and can mean loss of reputation and revenue, particularly with the highly sensitive data entrusted to government bodies, including citizens’ health records and personal data.

Software is certainly important, yet hardware must be a consideration of the security mix too. Cloud adoption introduces new hardware vulnerabilities. Applications are hosted outside the internal data centre, making it difficult for network administrators to track and analyse network performance in real-time. System lag and switch overutilisation could crash critical applications in the data centre and storage area network (SAN).

As a result, data centre teams need to continually monitor for potential security threats such as denial-of-service attacks, and identify bottlenecks or other performance issues quickly.

Steps to a secure environment

There are a number of steps that organisations can take to ensure a more secure cloud environment.

Involving network administrators and structured cabling teams to adopt a preventive approach with network monitoring, is not only effective in detecting errors and offering access to performance and utilisation data, but also ensures the accuracy of changes to produce only desired results.