NETSCOUT Harnesses Amazon VPC Ingress Routing Enhancements for Smart Data Intelligence
By Bruce Kelley Jr., Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, Service Provider, NETSCOUT
In today’s extremely competitive digital world, organizations are heavily investing in digital platforms and technologies such as cloud to deliver a fast, scalable, and secure experience for customers and users. The need for greater business agility and lower CapEx and OpEx has created a paradigm shift in priorities, technologies, and operations for both enterprise IT and Communication Service Providers (CSP). These include agile application and business service development utilizing microservices, deployment of software-defined solutions across hybrid infrastructures, and frequent workload migrations, which lead to constant changes in service architectures and dependencies.
With a charter to adopt best-in-class technology and rapidly build out their own unique digital capabilities, IT teams and CSPs are faced with new visibility challenges, and overcoming them is critical to ongoing digital transformation success. Companies often struggle to optimize application and business services performance and improve security because they cannot see across network borders, between cloud domains, and on-premises environments.
As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Advanced Technology Partner, NETSCOUT helps organizations gain the visibility they need to eliminate blind spots and innovate with confidence. Our Smart Data technology, which is relied upon by many Global 2000 enterprises and Tier 1 CSPs, enables IT NetOps and SecOps professionals to assure application performance and improve enterprise security across on-premises data centers and AWS cloud infrastructure.
By monitoring and capturing packet data traversing the cloud environments, performing simultaneous deep-packet inspection and real-time analysis, NETSCOUT’s vSTREAM virtual appliance generates Smart Data at its point of collection. This Smart Data delivers a comprehensive view into the performance characteristics of all infrastructure and application components and their dependencies.
Since Smart Data is generated by processing and analyzing packet data, it is important to develop a packet acquisition strategy across the hybrid cloud, including on-premises and cloud environments.
The adoption of new microservices architectures increases the volumes of traffic in server farms or clusters of compute and application workloads in AWS Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). The recently announced Amazon VPC Ingress Routing is a service that helps customers simplify the integration of network and security appliances within their network topology. With Amazon VPC Ingress Routing, customers can define routing rules at the Internet Gateway (IGW) and Virtual Private Gateway (VGW) to redirect ingress traffic to third-party appliances before it reaches the final destination. This makes it easier for customers to deploy production-grade applications with the networking and security services they require within their Amazon VPC. Amazon VPC Ingress Routing allows you to redirect the flow of traffic coming in and out of VPCs inline to security or packet-shaping virtual applications, which can now be effectively monitored through VPC traffic mirroring with vSTREAM for advanced service performance and security assurance. This approach complements NETSCOUT’s embedded virtual appliances that offer software-based instrumentation of application workloads.
As enterprises and CSPs scale their deployments in AWS and across hybrid cloud environments, an increasing volume of traffic traverses VPC boundaries. This trend is driven by accelerated workload migration to the cloud, which leads to frequent changes in service architectures. The recently announced Amazon VPC Ingress Routing Enhancement combined with Amazon VPC Traffic Mirroring allows NETSCOUT to effectively acquire traffic that traverses VPC boundaries and route it to vSTREAM appliances for real-time analysis for service and security assurance.
The new acquisition capabilities of both intra- and inter-VPC traffic in AWS are harnessed by NETSCOUT to effectively deliver visibility without borders across on-premises data centers, cloud, and hybrid cloud. This includes visibility into applications and their dependencies and actionable intelligence necessary to assure end-to-end service performance and cybersecurity. With this visibility, enterprises and CSPs can effectively migrate their business applications to AWS and create connections to AWS Direct Connect.
Read more about Amazon VPC Ingress Routing at this AWS blog.