NETSCOUT Extends Its Visibility Without Borders into Google Cloud with Packet Mirroring

By Danny Lobo, Vice President - Engineering, NETSCOUT

Enterprises require a comprehensive digital transformation (DX) strategy to compete and grow their business. According to IDC's report ‘IDC FutureScape: Worldwide CIO Agenda 2019 Predictions', the biggest issues facing IT leadership today revolve around business needs, capabilities and availability as they relate to DX. Advancements that involve delivering services across hybrid IT environments, including on-premises data centers, colocations (co-los) and clouds are quite literally reshaping the customer experience and opening the door to new business opportunities. As a result, this has created a paradigm shift in enterprise IT and Communication Service Providers (CSPs) priorities, technologies, and operations. Enterprises are being asked to shorten the time required to provision and assure services, while still finding ways to reduce capital expenditures and operational expenditures.

To address these challenges, IT is migrating application, compute, database, and storage workloads to the cloud. In fact, according to Forrester, nearly 60 percent of North American enterprises now rely on public cloud platforms, which is five times more than did just five years ago. Regardless of whether companies migrate application workloads using lift and shift and refactoring, or develop new ones with microservices, managing critical functions on cloud platforms such as Google Cloud necessitates that enterprises must rapidly address application performance and security issues as they occur through end-to-end visibility and actionable intelligence.

How does NETSCOUT make that happen? By offering Visibility Without Borders in Google Cloud and hybrid environments. Our solutions are based on innovative technology that transforms readily available packet data into Smart Data through simultaneous deep-packet inspection and real-time analysis. This provides actionable intelligence and the ability to triage service delivery problems across all applications, physical and virtual servers, service enablers, networks, and their dependencies. With Smart Data from NETSCOUT you get actionable application performance and security analytics from a single pane of glass. This means you do not need to parse through and correlate masses of disparate data, and instead gain targeted insights that get right to the heart of the matter.

NETSCOUT can efficiently acquire packet data through embedded software probes in any physical, virtualized, and containerized environment, as well as any public or private cloud, co-lo, or data center. The recently announced Google Cloud Packet Mirroring allows NETSCOUT to acquire packet data in an agentless fashion in Google Cloud and route it to vSTREAM virtual appliances that converts it into Smart Data. Both packet acquisition methods empower enterprises to effectively harness the intelligence of Smart Data for assuring both service security and performance.

NETSCOUT uses Smart Data to deliver real-time and back-in-time threat and forensic analysis. This is complemented by NETSCOUT's ATLAS (Advanced Threat Level Analysis System) Intelligence Feed, also known as AIF, based on a traffic data depository that includes stats developed from analysis of over one-third of internet traffic. AIF provides dynamic updates for accurate protection, campaign-based attack identification, fast attack response, and threat validity with prioritization. With NETSCOUT, you'll also get the consistent and precise visibility into application health and performance you need to assure the best user experience.

NETSCOUT empowers enterprises to accelerate application workload migration to Google Cloud with confidence, while retaining full visibility into application performance and security across the hybrid cloud.