You know by now that hackers literally never sleep. Chances are your network has been hit before and absolutely will be hit again. Hackers invent new techniques every day and tweak existing ones, many of which are automated—which is why we can say that hackers literally never sleep. Hackers either attack your network directly or attack your infrastructure through your network. Either way, the network itself is your first line of defense.

In the old days, it took a bunch of help desk tickets for an engineer to realize there was something wrong with the network. At that time, troubleshooting meant logging into network devices one-by-one to pore over logs. In the late 80s, SNMP was introduced giving engineers a way to manage network devices remotely. It quickly became a way to also collect and manage information about devices. That was a big step forward, and it marked the beginning of network visibility as we know it today.

One of the great things about being in the telecom industry is the constant innovation that occurs. For example, Microsoft just announced an exciting new offering for telecom service providers, Operator Connect Accelerator, aimed at helping them get the most out of their Teams investments. Operator Connect is Microsoft’s managed service for connecting Teams and telephony services.

With so many organizations focused on locking down environments, protocols like ICMP get immediately blocked without first weighing out the benefits.