Firewall Analysis to Monitor Bandwidth Utilization: MindTree Use Case

What's going through the pipes is important business and costs big money. Guaranteeing customer service, performance levels and quality experiences requires deep analysis and proactive monitoring. 

System integrator and IT consulting company, MindTree, is servicing a leading video software and services company that provides end-to-end media streaming and video asset management solutions to more than 2,400 clients in 50+ countries, including some of the world's biggest brands. This was achieved through a global infrastructure, consisting of regional R&D and data centers around the world through traditional, hybrid and private clouds.

The challenge was simple – to ensure and deliver a truly broadcast quality experience. MindTree consultants were assigned with the responsibility of maintaining the global network infrastructure and had to adhere to strict requirements for information security management, IT service management and quality management.

One of the tasks that MindTree consultants had to undertake for their client was capacity planning and assisting them in migrating data from one data center to another – a challenging task that demands huge bandwidth availability. They had carried out the pre-migration analysis and estimated that the available bandwidth would be more than sufficient for a quick data migration. However, during the actual migration they noticed that the available bandwidth was much lower than they had estimated. Hence, data migration was taking much longer than anticipated.

It was imperative for the consulting team to quickly identify the root cause of high bandwidth utilization and free it up. Using a tool called Firewall Analyzer, they unearthed the cause. It picked up unusually high consumption on remote access VPN tra­ffic and provided important insights into specific users (with IP address) connected to the VPN and the amount of tra­ffic being sucked up. They were able to bring the situation under control immediately.

In addition, they were able to perform firewall configuration audits, which helped them detect issues and vulnerabilities, identify conflicting or unused devices rules and meet auditing and compliance mandates. The firewall audit feature helped remove unused rules and spot these vulnerabilities due to device misconfigurations.

When network anomalies occurred in their clients’ environment, it triggered custom alerts from a centralized console. They were able to assign alerts to operators, whereby they could view the complete history of actions, notes on the alert and report on a very granular basis on the top VPN hosts, top protocols used and bandwidth consumption.

Bandwidth is not cheap, especially in a high capacity video streaming environment. Problem determination costs money too. MindTree has an execution model to meet customer expectation and service assurance levels.

Eric Wegner is a 20-year veteran of the industry and has 10 years of experience with ZOHO Corp . (formerly AdventNet) working on large and complex network management infrastructures for network equipment manufacturers, service providers and military contractors. Eric joined the company as the first sales person and is now business development manager leading the WebNMS division in North America.