In recent years, the pace of IT and network modernization fueled by digital transformation has only continued to accelerate. At the same time, cyber threats have continued to grow more frequent and sophisticated. Given these trends, the move to establish enhanced collaboration between network and security teams, an approach known as NetSecOps, has moved from a nice-to-have to a fundamental imperative.
In this blog post, I'll share some insights from a report by EMA Research, NetSecOps: Examining How Network and Security Teams Collaborate for a Better Digital Future. Based on a survey of 304 IT professionals from different sectors and regions, the report analyzes how network and security teams can collaborate to enhance their visibility, performance, and security posture in the context of continued digital transformation and increasing cyber threats. In the following sections, I’ll outline a few of the key takeaways from this important report.
Three Key Takeaways
1. NetSecOps can deliver tangible benefits and a positive ROI
According to the report, the top five benefits of NetSecOps collaboration are minimizing risks, enhancing operational performance, solving network issues more quickly, speeding mean time to detection (MTTD) and resolution (MTTR) of incidents, and reducing costs. NetSecOps can help foster a culture of collaboration between network and security teams, helping align teams around shared goals, processes, and tools. In the process, NetSecOps can help teams enhance network performance, security posture, operational efficiency, and business outcomes. However, the report also identifies the obstacles and gaps that prevent effective NetSecOps, such as a lack of visibility, communication, trust, and automation.
2. NetSecOps challenges must be addressed to improve collaboration between security and network teams
Within 70% of organizations, respondents cited data quality and authority issues and budget limitations as leading problems. The report recommends establishing trustworthy sources of network data that can offer both network and security operations teams a consistent and accurate view of the network state and behavior.
3. NetSecOps isn’t just desirable, it’s a necessity
By following the best practices and guidance from the report, network teams can foster a culture of collaboration and innovation with security teams, and ultimately deliver better value to their organizations.
Why network observability and management is essential for NetSecOps
According to the report, in 96% of companies, network data analysis is a key factor in facilitating increased collaboration between network and security teams. This indicates that network observability and management is an essential capability for modern enterprises that depend on complex and dynamic networks to deliver applications and services. These capabilities also benefit network and security teams who are adopting the NetSecOps approach to boost collaboration and achieve improved network performance and security.
Network observability can help teams quickly and easily answer any question about the network. These solutions collect and analyze diverse data sources, such as flow logs, routing tables, network latency and performance data, and much more. With this data, these solutions can provide insights into the network's internal infrastructure and how it affects business goals, SLAs, and user experience. Going beyond traditional network monitoring, network observability solutions enable teams to get answers to a range of questions, including the following:
- How do network elements influence the performance and availability of applications?
- How does the network configuration evolve over time and what are the consequences of those changes?
- How does the network traffic pattern change across different locations, devices, and protocols?
- How does the network behavior compare under normal and abnormal conditions?
- How does the network react to failures or anomalies?
To achieve optimal connectivity, teams need to integrate network observability and network management practices. Network observability provides teams with visibility into the performance and health metrics of the network. Network management tools enable network operations teams to discover, configure, monitor, and maintain network components.
How NetOps by Broadcom can Help
NetOps by Broadcom offers a robust set of network observability and management capabilities. With these capabilities, teams can optimize network operations, accelerate network transformation, and enhance connected experiences.
The solution equips users with a unified view of traditional networks as well as modern software-defined and multi-cloud environments. This enables teams to track every hop across the entire network delivery path and spot any degradation point—from the client to the cloud.
The solution also enables teams to rapidly isolate issues and address emerging requirements for next-generation network technologies. Via a single console, the solution gives network operations center teams end-to-end awareness across multiple domains, vendors, and technologies.
With the solution, the team at FIS (a leading FinTech company) can correlate individual device performance and end-to-end network delivery path health. Now they can pinpoint the root cause of any degradation that affects the user experience, whether it arises in internal networks or those managed by third parties, such as ISPs and cloud providers. This enables the IT operations team to identify and resolve any network issue much faster. In fact, with the solution, the team was able to speed triage by 95%.
Your next steps
The benefits of NetSecOps are clear. Through this approach, teams can improve network performance and experience, enhance their security posture, reduce costs, and deliver better business outcomes. The report provides compelling evidence that NetSecOps is not only possible, but necessary for the modern enterprise. It also offers practical guidance on how to establish NetSecOps, with recommendations for both network and security teams.
To learn more about NetSecOps and how it can help your organization, download the report today. Discover how network and security teams can work together for a better digital future.