Who Is Using Your Bandwidth?

Byte25 understand the challenges that MSPs & IT managers face in maintaining great performance and security across increasingly complex networks. Byte25 provide comprehensive network, application and cyber security monitoring to identify issues that impact performance and pinpoint potential cyber security threats.

Byte25 is a cloud based solution that is simple to deploy and presents meaningful information in a format that is accessible to both business managers and network engineers alike.

6 Ways Network Traffic Monitoring Adds Value to Your Tech Stack

Network traffic monitoring systems provide deep insight into the data running across your network, a window through which to visualize characteristics of users and applications as they perform their daily business operations. This level of visibility delivers a range of benefits including faster problem resolution, enhanced security and optimisation that ultimately provides cost savings to the business.

Let’s take a look at the benefits of a network traffic monitoring systems and why this should form a integral part of your tech stack …

1. Faster Identification & Remediation of Network Issues.

Ever since networks were invented, users have been complaining about performance and the network is always the first suspect when performance issues occur. A good network traffic monitoring solution provides a window in into the network flows to identify and diagnose network issues.

Network traffic monitoring provides real time analysis allowing network administrators to drill down into usage for individual sites, applications, or hosts in just a few clicks. Network traffic monitoring quickly identifies and troubleshoots performance issues such as bottlenecks, congestion and latency/jitter that affect user experience. This leads to faster and more reliable network performance, which can improve employee productivity and customer satisfaction.

2. Identify Hosts and Applications Soaking Up Bandwidth

A lot of network monitoring systems provide up/down alerting when devices fail or overall bandwidth monitoring via SNMP. For sure this type of monitoring is important for end users and MSPs alike, but it only tells part of the story.

Implemention of network traffic monitoring goes beyond simple up/down or bandwidth monitoring by providing detail of who and what is generating traffic. When a user at a remote site is experiencing performance issues, network traffic monitoring systems can look at the traffic to and from the site to see not only whether the link is saturated, but more importantly, the specific applications and addresses of devices generating traffic … both in real time and historically.

This level of visibility is invaluable in responding to network and application issues, making sure that users performance issues are quickly addressed irrespective of where they occur.

3. Optimize Network Performance

Over the last few years, network infrastructure has certainly become cheaper, however, the business dependence on reliable and performant network connectivity has also increased. Most businesses depend on network connectivity for cloud application connectivity, video conferencing/meetings, email and web browsing. Performance issues significantly impact business productivity.

Network traffic monitoring can help identify configuration issues or inefficiencies that can impact performance. For example, backups to remote servers that may run over into business hours soaking up network bandwidth, specific hosts downloading large files, remote users connecting to file servers across the network. Without effective network traffic monitoring, these issue oftne go undetected and have a detrimental affect on network performance.

Configuration issues can cause significant performance impact, network traffic monitoring provides the insight to identify and address these issues allowing for optimal network performance.

4. Enhance Network Security

Cyber security is top of mind for most organisations, enhancing cyber security is an ongoing challenge for organisations and MSPs alike. By characterising network traffic and storing a record of network conversations, network traffic monitoring provides a valuable tool to help detect and respond to cyber security issues.

Let’s look at this a little deeper … security issues detected by systems like firewalls, IDS’ or SIEMs will provide specific threat details such as IP address and perhaps even information on the protocols and techniques used. By storing historical data, network traffic monitoring tools take this a step further by allowing visibility of which other devices a potentially malicious IP address has communicated with over time, which hosts within the network may have been infected with specific malware, or even identify traffic coming from suspicious domains, unauthorised countries, or addresses with suspect IP reputation.

By inspecting all network traffic, network traffic monitoring provides an extra level of security to respond to cyber security events detected by other systems helping to identify cyber issues that other tools may miss.

5. Cost Savings and Increased Productivity

No ‘benefit’ list would be complete without the perennial ‘save time and money’ clause, but in this instance there are demonstrable cost and productivity benefits in the visibility that network traffic monitoring tools provide.

A well performing network allows users to undertake their day-to-day business tasks effectively and without frustration. This alone is enough to justify the investment in network traffic monitoring. But there are also tangible benefits from a support point of view. When problems do occur the mean time to resolve issues is significantly reduced adding value to both the support teams and the business as a whole.

We often talk about ROI when implementing new tools and vendors are often keen to quote outrageous dollar figures, but the reality is that given the relatively low cost of implementing network traffic monitoring, the cost benefits to the business is substantial.

6. Policy Compliance

Network ftraffic monitoring tools are useful in aligning network usage with corporate policy and identifying potential violations. Network traffic monitoring solutions that utilise deep packet inspection are able to identify specific applications and websites and associate them with the initiating device.

Every organisation will have a different set of corporate access policies, it may be that file sharing applications are allowed but access to the dark web via ToR based browsers is prohibited, perhaps specific web sites, streaming services or social media applications are banned. Policy compliance may also extend to th eprotocol level, pehaps specific protocls such as telnet are no allowed or specifc versions of SSL are of concern. Either way, a network traffic monitoring tool is integral in identifying and providing evidence for corporate policy violations.

* Special Offer Pricing Till the End of April 2023