Assessing the Business Value of StealthWatch
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POSTED BY Jody Ma Kissling on 11.18.2011 0 comments |
It is easy for anyone reponsible for IT management to get so consumed with everyday technology and security issues that they do not take time to evaluate the priorities of the businesses and organizations they serve. Lancope has prepared a few concise documents to help IT management quickly evaluate StealthWatch from the business perspective. The full whitepaper: “Aligning Network, Security, and Application Performance Monitoring with Business Value and Priorities” is available on the Lancope website. This whitepaper covers how flow-based monitoring holds specific advantages for filling gaps in visibility, delivering valuable intelligence to supplement traditional IDS/IPS perimeter protection, as well as application performance management.
Several common themes come to light that offer direct business and organizational value when deploying StealthWatch, each of them with non-trivial direct savings opportunities. Most of these savings are based on a reduction of downtime or productivity loss due to performance degradation or infrastructure compromise, though some are more discrete in nature. A few specific examples are listed below.
Faster MTTx: The first challenge of any reactive situation is to get to the bottom of the issue and reduce the Mean Time To (MTT) complete a number of tasks.
First comes identification (MTTI), then diagnosis (MTTD), and finally actions to complete a restoration/repair (MTTR). The savings opportunities here are accelerating return to normal operations. The StealthWatch 6.0 release, with its logical grouping and Relational Flow Maps, is delivering significant improvements in MTTI and MTTD, improving both the top and bottom line of the overall cost of operations equation. With the intuitive nature of StealthWatch console interfaces such as the Relational Flow Maps, improvements in MTTR can also be realized by extending access to front-line IT service desk personnel, potentially improving first-call resolution rates – particularly valuable for the most critical resources and applications.
Extended MTBF: Extending Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is predominantly a means of protecting the top line, both in short- and long-term views, and is of particular concern for the most business critical applications and services. The new StealthWatch Relational Flow Maps represent precisely the kind of management technology that operations teams need for intelligent recognition of potential issues and when combined with advanced behavior analysis, put operators in an even more proactive position.
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