New research from Yankee Group sheds light on one of the greatest challenges facing enterprise IT departments: managing the configurations and security postures on thousands of network devices across a globally dispersed IP infrastructure.
The new whitepaper details a number of IP network vulnerabilities due to lapses in security, compliance and proper configuration, and spotlights the need for solutions that help to rectify configuration errors in IP network devices. Telcordia, which is announcing highlights of the report this week, says its IP Assure is one such product.
The Yankee Group whitepaper, entitled “IP Network Configuration and Vulnerabilities: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You,” covers how misconfigured infrastructure, unknown ingress/egress points and basic vulnerabilities to core networking equipment threaten business continuity and affect organizations’ bottom lines. With the Open Security Foundation stating that – in 2009 alone – 37 organizations lost almost 132 million sensitive records through external hacks, large organizations need a safeguarding technology such as IP Assure that continually analyzes IP networks in their entirety, not just on a per-device or per-protocol basis, and delivers real-time, multi-level, multi-protocol views and topologies.
As underscored by Yankee Group senior analyst Phil Hochmuth, “More and more organizations are opening their networks to external business partners, suppliers, contractors and customers, and all this increased connectivity introduces more complexity, which creates management and operational challenges for network and security operations teams. With the rapid pace of change within an infrastructure due to equipment modifications and security demands, those teams need a solution that offers a complete view of the state of the network, including compliance, network vulnerability mitigation, traffic/infrastructure engineering and application troubleshooting.”
Telcordia says IP Assure already helps worldwide organizations to improve the security and operations of their IP networks, including a high-profile branch of the U.S. government, where severe security breaches and compliance issues were detected and eliminated.
“Enterprises now can measure by-the-hour or by-the-minute data on revenue or productivity lost if their critical network connections go down,” said Adam Drobot, CTO & president, Advanced Technology Solutions, Telcordia. “IP Assure significantly reduces costs associated with configuration errors that can add up to millions of dollars per year for a Global 2000 organization.”
