Page 62 - Cyber Warnings

3. Instrument for metadata generation in a cloud-friendly fashion
• Legacy approaches to network performance data gathering relied on discrete network
interfaces such as tap and span ports, which aren’t necessarily available in cloud,
container, and distribution application environments

• Make sure that you can generate network performance data directly from application
servers, load balancers (such as HAProxy and NGINX) in cloud environments, as well
as from traditional datacenter and network environments

4. Don’t forget about the internet
• If you’re running a digital business or starting a digital business initiative, visibility into
how your application traffic gets across the Internet is critical

• You can get this by utilizing metadata gathered from the Border Gateway Protocol
(BGP), the communications protocol that is used for internet routing

5. Avoid metadata siloes
• The pre-cloud approach was to have a separate appliance or server deployment for
different types of data, where humans had to visually scan separate screens to correlate
data.

• Use a big data system instead, but not just any architecture, as a tempting but
problematic systems approach is to store different types of data in separate tables or
pools with little to no indexed correlation between the data types.

This leads to unusable timeframes for querying, since systems have to assemble data
from different places into a queryable set.

6. Adopt distributed systems architectures for monitoring and analytics
• The cost of disk and CPU have plummeted, and distributed computing technology allows
retention of full details of generated metadata

• Aggregation and holistic analysis of very large data sets are now possible and yield far
more value

7. Upgrade your expectations for network data analysis
• The scale limitations of legacy approaches meant that only summary reports were
available, with limited drill downs

62 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine December 2016 Edition
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