Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Network monitoring is a vital part of your security architecture and layered security portfolio. Step one in your network monitoring safety checklist is making sure you have network monitoring in the first place. The rest of our steps assume you have network monitoring and lay out five ways to optimize its value.

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.

When it comes to IT, you can’t do anything with an asset you can’t see. When it comes to your networking, monitoring offers the eyeballs to know what is going on. But IT and network pros don’t spend all day staring at a dashboard waiting for something to happen. Like your local police department, they rely on notifications of trouble. Instead of 911 calls, IT depends on network alerts.

WhatsUp Gold provides specialized Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) Service Level Agreement (SLA) monitoring necessary for tracking Quality of Service (QoS) and SLA metrics for your network of deployed VoIP devices (telephones, conference room devices and more). After you discover and configure devices for VoIP monitoring, you can view results and graphs on the WhatsUp Gold Custom Performance Monitors dashboard.

Part of our job here at Progress is to not only look at the challenges our customers are currently facing, but also to look at the technology landscape in general and consider the challenges they’re going to be facing. We don’t have a crystal ball, of course, but there are a plenty of trends that are obvious to even the most casual observer. Security has always been important, but the last year has made it clear exactly how important it is for every organization with a network.

Financial services firms face three key network issues: maintaining compliance with an array of regulations, keeping a growing horde of financial data hungry hackers at bay, and earning the trust of users with an always-on responsive network. Financial data is so valuable, cybercriminals make getting it a top priority. And financial services networks are so interconnected and complex, there are all sorts of ways hackers can try to break in. The security threat to finance is more than bad.

It is always big news when governmental organizations are attacked. And they are attacked frequently. Hackers love headlines, which is one reason to go after high profile government targets. But the real reason hackers love governmental organizations is because that’s where the juicy data is. Even small governmental organizations hold confidential and classified information—exactly the secrets state-sponsored groups and other cybercriminals drool over.