We are in the age of network connectivity, modern life’s data plumbing. Despite the ubiquity and fundamental nature of computer networks, businesses overlook them as an advantage. Every day, products are manufactured by network connected machinery, we buy those products over networks, we book holidays, summon our cars, organise dates, order coffee and make complaints. When networks fail, our lives fall apart and businesses grind to a halt. Highly performant, predictable and reliable networks are an inescapable requirement of modern life and any margin for error is unacceptable.

Networks are Everywhere

Modern IP network connectivity is any-to-any and everything on a network requires a communication channel to something, somewhere. This ultimate enablement technology, that provides constant availability, is sadly also an enabler of threats to our daily activities. The network itself is a target for attackers but more fundamentally, networks provide a conduit for the compromise of any connected device. The list of devices is long, spans years of deployments and includes personal and business phones, corporate PCs, home devices, manufacturing and utility equipment, national infrastructure, private and public cloud systems and internet connected IoT devices. These are all reachable by default, all capable of exposing private data and enable a waypoint to probe further or degrade the services we rely on.

Any-To-Any Connectivity

Today’s wireless and wired network solutions provide incredibly fast and ubiquitous connectivity from the largest data centre to the smallest of edges. We can provide data centre compute and storage connectivity right the way up to 800 Gigabit/s with cost, heat and power consumption all reducing year on year as networking technology advances. WAN technologies are now available that simplify the core of the mobile and fixed carrier networks, others provide enterprises with simpler and more cost-effective methods of connectivity between their users and the resources they need. Resources can live on-premises or in public-cloud infrastructure and all of these network domains can be stitched together into a cohesive end-to-end system.

If designed correctly, with the right blend of solutions, networks are fit-for-purpose, scalable, highly available and, perhaps most importantly, manageable. They can offer a lot more value than just connectivity. Telemetry data from networking devices provides a window into real-time and historical behaviour, on a per network domain basis or from an end-to-end perspective. We can extract flow and packet data from anywhere, giving us a complete view of the traffic that is traversing our networks, invaluable for capacity management, trending, application visibility, troubleshooting and root cause analysis. When combined with host-level and application telemetry, we can have full spectrum end-to-end visibility of the environments we support.

It’s Time To Get It Right

The networks that we build have enabled universal connectivity and with it an explosion of IT innovation. They are also the enablers of malicious intent and a means for threat actors to access your systems. To counter this, we must properly design secure networks, not just introduce network security products at the somewhat dated notion of a perimeter. Simple solutions fail for complex problems and so the industry must embrace a combinational approach. Multifactor security designs and processes, analytics, integrated security functions in to networking elements, network segmentation, encryption, observability and zero-trust technology, are all a part of the solution. If we take the position that suffering a breach is inevitable, then the ultimate backstop is to have full visibility of what is happening to our infrastructure and the traffic patterns forwarded across our networks. Even if we can’t stop an attack, exploit or breach, we can at least understand what happened and take action.

Data leaks and breaches cost companies on average about $4.5 million dollars a year, and that number will only increase. With everything we do relying on network connectivity, it’s time to invest in the reliability, performance, dynamism and security of your entire system, which is rooted to the network. Data is the lifeblood of every business, and the network is the key component that connects the decision-making logic to the data.

We are Curvium

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