In a recent interview, Ariana Lynn, Principal Analyst at The Fast Mode spoke to Nick Harders, APJ SASE Director of HPE Aruba Networking on the impact of traffic visibility on modern IP networks. Nick joins us in a series of discussions with leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies, assessing the need for traffic filtering technologies that can deliver real-time, granular application awareness. The series explores how advanced analytics power various network functions amidst the rapid growth in traffic and applications.
Ariana: How important is traffic visibility for your suite of solutions and products?
Nick: Traffic visibility is critical to delivering high-performance edge access solutions that holistically address customers’ changing business requirements. Granular network and security policies are reliant on precise and timely traffic telemetry from diverse enterprise sources. Such visibility empowers network and security operators to influence network behaviour but is contingent on trusting the accuracy of these insights. Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is an important component of this equation, as this provides telemetry from the user’s perspective and complements any infrastructure-specific view of traffic patterns and application performance. A comprehensive traffic visibility strategy yields business intelligence, optimises network deployments and operational expenditure, and in particular, right-sizes carrier circuits and direct internet breakout for SaaS and cloud-based applications.
IT departments provide a vital service to their internal business users. Accurately measuring network and security Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and ensuring their fulfilment emerge as crucial strategies for validating investments in SD-WAN and SSE solutions. Once critical applications are mapped against defined SLAs, dynamic routing can be used to maximise reliability, performance, and cost efficiency based on real-time traffic insights. This approach ensures business objectives are met and justifies technology investments as an enabler for the business.
Ariana: What technologies are most effective in delivering real-time traffic visibility? What are your views on open-source software for delivering such visibility?
Nick: There are various approaches to source the required telemetry for real-time traffic visibility, whether these be inline network/security components (hardware) or applications specifically designed to measure network traffic reliability and performance (software). Appliance-based methods leverage hardware acceleration, employing Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) for data extraction with negligible impact to network performance. Conversely, software solutions become more limited in terms of the volume of data that can be assessed for traffic visibility purposes but work well in distributed architectures where data is collected at the very edge of the network, or at the user level directly (especially in the case of DEM). Regardless of approach, preserving the correlation between user and traffic is crucial for precise traffic steering, operational insight, and SLA assessment. Metadata associated with network and security telemetry needs to remain intact.
While open-source tools are prevalent and often integrated into vendor offerings, managing their limitations is essential to ensure any shortfalls of these tools do not adversely impact the overall value of the vendor solutions being deployed. This may entail modifying or enhancing open-source capability to better align with primary use cases. Traffic patterns and application behaviour are extremely dynamic in nature especially given their reliance on equally dynamic cloud environments – IP addresses, auto-scaling microservices, and even the location of underlying data can often span multiple data centres and various geographical locations. The ability to identify and then correlate the telemetry associated with any specific application can be complex, making it imperative that telemetry is sourced from multiple components within the enterprise environment before applying deduplication and intelligent correlation. This allows network and security operators to more efficiently pinpoint issues impacting user experience or application performance.
Nick Harders, APJ SASE Director at HPE Aruba Networking, boasts 20+ years in networking and cloud engineering. His leadership extends to large teams, specializing in infrastructure solutions and cloud transformations. As Solutions Director, he partners with sales, customers, and global providers in APJ, driving business success with HPE Aruba Networking solutions. Beyond, he’s held senior roles at iQor and Macquarie Group.
This interview is a part of The Fast Mode’s Traffic Visibility segment, featuring leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies and their views on the importance of network intelligence and DPI for today’s IP networks. A research report on this topic will be published in June 2024 – for more information, visit here.
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