Overview
Observability and Protection Across the Train and Rail Environment
The train and rail industry is an essential part of the global transportation system, moving billions of passengers and cargo every year, with demand growing annually. Every passenger journey and cargo shipment relies on the increasingly complex and connected digital infrastructure that supports train operations and control, passenger ticketing, cargo movement, and safety and security.
At a time when the traveling public has multiple choices for its traveling needs, customer digital experience has become increasingly important. Expectations are high as passengers interact with contact centers, mobile apps, web-based reservation systems, and electronic ticketing. This makes the performance, availability, security, and resilience of the enterprise networks that support these services essential to keeping rail operations moving.
Trusted by industry leaders worldwide
Challenges
Short Heading: Managing the Complexity of Distributed Train and Rail Networks
Downtime-Intolerant Operations at Risk Without Proactive Observability
In a business that operates 24/7/365, unplanned downtime creates immediate financial, operational, safety, and reputational risks for train and rail operators. Maintenance system outages and communications failures can lead to multi-hour outages that impact passengers, cargo, crew, and staff.
Uptime, Security Threats, and Operational Resilience
Sophisticated ransomware and DDoS attacks target train and rail networking environments, affecting websites, mobile applications, and reservation systems, disrupting passengers’ ability to purchase and use tickets electronically and making operational resilience essential to protecting user experience and business continuity.
End-to-End Visibility Gaps Impact User Experience
Network complexity and digital dependency have been increasing for years making assuring train and rail performance and security more challenging than ever. Gaps in end-to-end visibility anywhere in the train communications environment slow troubleshooting efforts, prolong outages, degrade the digital experience, and make it harder to isolate issues.
Expanded Attack Surfaces Increase Risks
Station platform-based ticket vending machines, mobile apps, and payment processing services increase exposure and complicate service recovery. As train and rail operational systems increasingly connect to enterprise IT and hybrid and public cloud environments, new attack paths emerge, raising exposure and increasing operational risk.
Costly Data Silos and Fragmented Observability
Telemetry often sits with separate operations and security teams, which slows investigation and extends resolution times. Fragmented data collection can increase the cost of data retention while providing observability across only a portion of network locations and a subset of application services in use.
Outcomes That Matter
The Importance of Observability When Getting Passengers and Cargo from Point A to Point B
Reduce Costly Downtime of Critical Train and Rail Applications
NETSCOUT provides comprehensive observability for many applications used in train and rail operations, including operations and control, positive train control (PTC), passenger operations, safety and security, CCTV/video surveillance and emergency communications, and mobile apps. Real-time observability with NETSCOUT Smart Data helps IT quickly pinpoint and resolve application-specific issues across the multivendor ecosystem.
Protect Rail Operations and Reduce Financial Damages from Cyber Incidents
Rapid detection and response across train and rail environments with NETSCOUT helps reduce the risk and impact of DDoS attacks and suspicious activity, including lateral movement and data exfiltration. This helps prevent operational disruption to network infrastructure and minimize financial impact and regulatory fines.
Reduce Time to Knowledge and Resolve Disruptions
Proactive monitoring of train and rail environments helps pinpoint issues and their root cause quickly, giving IT actionable insight. This dramatically lowers mean time to knowledge (MTTK) and mean time to resolve (MTTR), restoring performance for passengers, staff, and crew.
Operationalize Zero Trust to Reduce Cyber Risk
Deep packet inspection (DPI) and Smart Data reveal anomalous activity across interconnected services in train and rail networks, including AI-driven traffic, helping contain threats earlier.
Protect and Extend the Value of Existing and Future Investments
Future-proof corporate capital investments in AI, IoT, and automation while simultaneously optimizing ROI with observability and security solutions that meet today’s train and rail operational needs and scale for tomorrow’s growth.
Use Cases
Operational Excellence for the Train and Rail Industry
Commercial rail and commuter train operators depend on understanding their network environments, service behavior, and emerging risks to support seamless experiences that delight their passengers.
What Our Customers Are Saying
"What I like best about NETSCOUT Network & Application Observability is its end-to-end visibility across both network and application layers. It helps quickly identify performance issues by providing real-time insights into traffic, service dependencies, and user experience. The platform's deep packet analysis and intuitive dashboards make troubleshooting faster, reducing the time required to detect and resolve problems. I also appreciate its ability to monitor complex hybrid and cloud environments from a centralized view, which improves operational efficiency and overall service reliability."
- Ambuj P | Read full reviews
Resources
Rapid triage and faster MTTR for issues impacting service delivery of PTC communications with packet-based visibility...
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
What train and rail applications should be part of proactive observability strategies?
Comprehensive monitoring and analysis, leveraging a network vantage point, provides critical insights into virtually all train and rail application performance, activity, service dependencies, and the underlying network, including connectivity and traffic paths that impact network performance, latency, errors, packet loss, and much more. This is critically important for applications used in every area of train and rail operations, including train operations and control, such as PTC and SCADA; passenger operations, including ticketing and POS; safety and security operations, including CCTV/video surveillance and emergency communications; asset and maintenance operations of train telemetry and equipment; and enterprise and digital services, such as ERP, collaboration and VoIP, passenger Wi-Fi, and websites/mobile apps.
How does NETSCOUT support Zero Trust and security in train and rail operations?
Security and Zero Trust initiatives are powered by NETSCOUT’s Omnis Cybersecurity solutions, including Omnis Cyber Intelligence and Omnis CyberStream. It is critical to leverage these solutions to provide packet-level insights for validating network segmentation, monitoring policy enforcement, and investigating suspicious activity. Train and rail organizations benefit from the insights they gain from real-time network behavior to identify lateral movement, exfiltration of confidential data, and control gaps across broadly distributed, hybrid environments.
How Can NETSCOUT help with user experience and performance issues throughout the distributed train and rail network environments?
NETSCOUT supports observability in any infrastructure, for any location, including stations with POS systems for ticket purchases and CCTV/video surveillance for safety and security of the passengers. The IT team can assure performance and security for local commuter train operators and regional or national commercial rail organizations.NETSCOUT’s solutions for observability deliver proactive monitoring using Smart Data from deep packet inspection (DPI) that enables IT organizations to move beyond reactive troubleshooting into more predictive and preventative postures, which are criticalto the success of both the rail operators and their passengers’ journeys.
How does NETSCOUT protect the availability of train and rail networks?
NETSCOUT’s Arbor DDoS protection solution provides commercial train and local rail organizations with multilayer DDoS protection that stops attacks at the edge, scales in the cloud, and adapts in real time. By combining always-on, on-premises mitigation with cloud-scale capacity and AI-driven intelligence, NETSCOUT protects critical application and network services from all attack types and sizes.
How does NETSCOUT’s performance analysis of train and rail applications differ from competitors’ tools?
NETSCOUT’s patented Adaptive Service Intelligence® (ASI) technology, or Smart Data, delivers AI-ready, IP intelligence and metadata derived from packets. It natively supports over a thousand applications “out of the box,” including critical train- and rail-specific applications used for train operations and control, passenger ticketing and POS, safety and security operations, and emergency communications. Additionally, flexible configuration options are available to support custom applications. NETSCOUT is the only solution to provide such flexibility.
