Introducing Blue Insight: A Revolutionary Networking Visibility Solution
Networks are the backbone of any modern business, supporting critical applications and services that drive productivity, innovation, and customer satisfaction. However, managing and optimizing network performance in today’s complex and dynamic environments can be a daunting challenge for IT leaders, especially doing so securely.
One of the key issues faced by CIOs and CISOs alike, is the lack of visibility into their corporate network’s IP traffic. Most concerning is the tracking of what’s called “East-West” network traffic, which is the communication between different servers, containers, virtual machines, sites, or any internal resources within the same network. According to a recent report by Gartner, that East-West network traffic is expected to grow exponentially with the mainstream adoption of cloud, microservices, and IoT technologies. Unless your corporate network was custom built with the latest technology for seamless hybrid cloud operations (hint: nobody’s corporate network is built for this), East-West traffic is often impossible or extremely cumbersome to track down with traditional network monitoring tools, primarily focused on performance, not security. This creates blind spots and gaps in the network communication data, leading to inaccurate mapping of network dependencies, inefficient troubleshooting, and increased security risks.
To address this challenge, Blue Mantis developed our revolutionary Blue Insight solution that provides deep visibility into East-West traffic that is both hardware vendor and design agnostic—making it flexible enough to fit into any network. Blue Insight is a software-only solution using advanced flow-based techniques (e.g., NetFlow and IPFIX) to collect, analyze, and visualize network traffic data at the packet level, without requiring any additional hardware or agents. This data is also deduplicated (goodbye days of manually sifting endlessly through network logs) for a clear view of network communication occurring on your network, which enables security controls to be implemented with drastically reduced chance for impact to business operations and reduces time to implement. Blue Insight can also map traffic at the micro-segmentation level to see communications between virtual machines, not just networks.
Unique application interdependency mapping
Using Blue Insight to assess your network results in a complete inventory for all active network traffic based on active flow data so you can see exactly how all your applications on your network communicate. This network app interdependency mapping is extremely important because it enables IT departments to see how different grouping objects communicate and build policies based on live flow data, not outdated and inaccurate application diagrams. Using real data reduces the chance of human error and the burden on application owners to track down and provide information.
As network perimeters disappear and the list of apps and users begin to sprawl, IT leaders use Blue Insight to segment groups of servers and see how they communicate based on flow data, build ruleset reports based on that data and get micro-segmentation right the first time.
Blue Insight enables IT leaders to quickly and easily assess their network to:
- Get the data needed to properly document complex network interdependencies, which can help in planning, auditing, and compliance purposes.
- Provide insight needed in cloud migrations to reduce costly misconfigurations, downtime, performance degradation, and budgeting miscalculations.
- Optimize network performance and resource utilization by identifying bottlenecks, anomalies, and inefficiencies in the network traffic patterns.
- Streamline deployment of security initiatives while reducing the chance of unplanned impact to the business by leveraging real deduplicated data from the network traffic.
- Enhance network security and resiliency by detecting and responding to malicious or suspicious activities, such as data exfiltration, lateral movement, or denial-of-service attacks.
Flow-based network visibility as a service
Blue Insight is designed to be easy to deploy, scalable, and compatible with any network infrastructure, whether it is on-premises, in the cloud, or hybrid. Most importantly, the agentless install Blue Mantis performs for a Blue Insight assessment has no impact on your server resources during the assessment and speeds up deployment time to get your valuable data faster. If you like the powerful and unique level of visibility that Blue Insight provides during the assessment, then Blue Mantis can help integrate our Blue Insight solution into your network for continuous, holistic, and unified views of your network’s performance and health.
If you are interested in learning more about Blue Insight and how it can help you gain unprecedented visibility and control over your network, then let’s meet. Our networking experts can install and assess the current state of your network and recommend optimizations.
