Nothing’s worse than getting a call from the users that the network is down. Too often, IT lacks the visibility they need to get before performance issues arise, meaning you’re in the dark until a user or customer calls to complain. Once an outage happens, the clock is ticking. And the more time you take to understand and resolve the issue, the more it costs you: in terms of customer dissatisfaction, and also staff time & lost productivity.

A Network Operations Center (NOC) is a location from which IT support technicians can supervise, monitor, and maintain client networks and infrastructure. Because they act as a central nervous system for many organizations, NOCs are typically located in a central physical location. The global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is an unprecedented situation that is creating new challenges for everyone—and that includes NOCs.

As an IT leader, it’s important to step back, sometimes, and view what you can do better with your service desk. Because small issues and inefficiencies can easily add up to day-to-day chaos. In organizations where IT services are aligned with business objectives, they are more likely to make investments in new technologies like AI & ML. Periodic reviews will make sure that the alignment stays. Here we are going to look at some areas where putting efforts can yield significant result.

Web proxies intercept traffic from your systems as they move to other systems, analyze the packets, then send the data along. There are a lot of reasons why you might want to intercept packets. Originally the main use case for a proxy was as a caching server. In this use case, the first time a person in your network goes to a website, the static content (particularly graphic images) gets downloaded and cached. Then, because the content is local, the next person to hit that site will get a fast response.

To make sure no site content is modified or intercepted en route, HTTPS protocol is used (this is currently a must; using HTTP, insecure version, is strongly discouraged). Different versions of so called “transport security layer” protocol, known as TLS, can be used to provide the mentioned secure data exchange.

The first means to collect security-relevant information at Cloud SIEM Enterprise (CSE) was our Network Sensor. It was built to analyze network traffic and provide visibility beyond traditional SIEM's down to the network-level. Beyond organizing packets into flows, the sensor supports more advanced features such as decoding of common protocols, file carving, SSL certificate validation, OS fingerprinting, clustered deployment and more.

The work of an admin or network administrator may seem ordinary, that type of work that just follows a guide, but right now, you could not be further from truth. Here I bring you network scanning, a task that could take a lot of your time… or little, if you have Pandora FMS by your side and with the help of one of those free software applications included in GNU / Linux. Let’s take a look!

Telemetry is the collection of measurements or other data at remote or inaccessible points and their automatic transmission to receiving equipment for monitoring. In network telemetry, network devices such as routers, firewalls and switches push real-time data continuously to one or more centralized locations for storage, processing and analysis.

Your phone is ringing off the hook. Another client is calling, trying to figure out how to ensure their team can continue to be productive in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though these are extraordinary times, your role as the IT professional hasn’t really changed. Your job is to make sure your clients are productive and they can still access the resources, tools, and applications they need to do their jobs.