If you've been part of a network segmentation or Zero Trust architecture planning project or a data center or application migration initiative, the following scenario probably rings true.
You start by asking the application owners about the traffic going to and from their applications.
It's simply not on the application owner's radar because what they do on a daily basis doesn't require that level of technical detail.
If you find an architecture diagram from when the application was deployed several years ago, you can bet it's no longer accurate.
You've learned from past painful lessons that -if you implement a network policy based on old information, applications are going to start to break.
Because application owners don't have granular observability into application traffic, communication is often more open than it needs to be.
Understanding your application traffic lets you know to what extent network segmentation rules are overly permissive, creating lateral movement risks, if you need more granular access policies to limit that access.
A similar problem exists for data center and application migration projects.
Whether you're migrating from one data center to another or moving an application from a data center to the cloud, you need to understand the behavior of the application traffic.
Organizations traditionally have had no good way to gain application traffic observability across their entire multi-cloud and hybrid network.
The NetOps, SecOps, and CloudOps teams each have access to different tools and views of data, but the application owner is still in the dark.
Another strategy I've seen is to try to gather the raw data, put it into a data lake, and write queries to pull out data for individual application owners.
The network team then sends spreadsheets to the application owners who annotate the spreadsheet and send it back to the operations team.
At a foundational level, the Netography Fusion platform presents a holistic and reliable picture of all the network communication related to your applications in your multi-cloud and on-prem environments that your cloud, network, security operations, and application teams can use.
Context transforms the metadata in your network from a table of IP addresses, ports, and protocols into context-rich descriptions of the activities of your applications and devices.
In our self-service SaaS model, application owners can log in, see the actual application traffic, both inbound and outbound, and use that information to understand and define the communication flows required for their application to work.
Application owners get real-time awareness of actual application traffic enriched with context from your tech stack.
Post-migration, your NetOps and CloudOps teams can use Fusion's real-time observability for troubleshooting application networking issues.
Equally important, there are no more blank stares from your application owners.
It's that Eureka moment when you discover how applications actually operate versus how they should operate so you can move forward on your segmentation or migration project with confidence.
This Cyber News was published on securityboulevard.com. Publication date: Fri, 28 Jun 2024 17:13:04 +0000