Steve Jobs never set out to penetrate the corporate market with his iPad, but the sheer portability and usability of the device, coupled with the lure of free fast and unmetered internet connectivity make the presence of employee–owned laptops, tablets and smartphones on the corporate LAN an almost inevitability. The poor guy responsible for enforcing corporate policy doesn’t stand a chance. Really, he doesn’t, and the faster organizations get their heads around the issue the better, as it could have far reaching impacts in the longer term.

ZDNet published a great article yesterday talking about 8 ways to improve your corporate network security. This blog is extracted verbatim from the site. Given that we wrote it, we think this is justifiable. Our thanks to the team at ZDNet for supporting us.

Networks are getting faster, IT is migrating to the cloud, applications are sharing the web and people are bringing their own devices to work. These factors, coupled with the fact that the bad guys are playing a smarter game than they’ve ever played before, combine together to have a profound impact on the way that organizations must start behaving. If you are responsible for protecting a mission-critical network, here are eight things that you need to think about:

Here at Endace we spend a lot of time helping all sorts of organizations solve really tough networking problems- the kind that make you pull your hair out and scream at your laptop. Our one mission in life is to reduce what we’ve dubbed the ‘time to visibility’ on network issues – whether that’s an outage, an application problem or an attack. Time to visibility is the amount of time, measured in minutes, it takes from someone (or something) reporting an issue to an engineer having the precise data that they need to resolve it conclusively. Stating the blindingly obvious, the shorter the time to visibility the more you can be do with the resources you’ve got. The concept isn’t rocket science, but it’s a metric missed by most vendors and a lot of organizations.

If you work for a big organization there’s a better than average chance that your network security defenses are already breached somewhere. For organizations with valuable data this is the new reality. Organizations on the front foot are responding by investing in a wide range of IT tools to stop the bad guys getting inside in the first place, but they’re also investing in the tools to figure out what the bad guys who’ve already penetrated are doing. Network recording solutions have historically had a bad rap – ‘unreliable’ and ‘expensive’ are criticisms that have been leveled at the category, but the case for pervasive full packet capture is changing as fast as the technology that enables it.

NWW published a great article yesterday talking about the need for 100% accurate packet capture. This blog is extracted verbatim from the article. Given that we wrote it, we think this is justifiable. Our thanks to John Dix at NWW for supporting us on it.

A new class of packet based network monitoring and recording solutions are emerging that enable companies running high-speed and ultra-high-speed networks to address the issue of network blindness, a condition that exposes organizations to a raft of operational, legal, compliance and reputational risks. With the cost of network downtime measured in millions of dollars per hour, knowing what’s going on inside the network isn’t just a nice to have, it’s critical.