NETWORK MONITORING

A UK Government Agency

Monitoring activity in a network is critical to maintain the availability of systems and reduce the likelihood of an attack affecting business operations. Where an organisation has multiple networks, monitoring becomes more difficult and less manageable.

Monitoring each network separately is an option, but a single overall view of all networks is not achieved and the cost of monitoring can be higher.

For the data to be transferred securely and as quickly as possible to a management domain, an air-gap, where there is no physical connection, is inefficient and open to security risks.

To achieve a single view, all monitored networks need to be connected to a monitoring system, but this introduces the new risk that data may flow between the networks, creating malware and data loss vulnerabilities.

A software solution such as a firewall certainly does filter information coming from another network, but it is also vulnerable to attack and misconfiguration giving rise to the possibility that sensitive information will flow the other, ‘wrong’ way.

A guaranteed one-way transfer mechanism is required to ensure that monitoring data is streamed to the central location in real time without risk of leakage and without inadvertently interconnecting the monitored networks and risking a loss of confidentiality.