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May - 2014 - issue > CXO View Point

Complete Visibility of Tsunami-Like Cyber Attacks

Naveen Bhat
Vice President & General Manager, Asia Pacific-Ixia Pte Ltd.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
Naveen Bhat
Ixia (NASDAQ: XXIA) provides converged Internet Protocol (IP) network validation and network visibility solutions. Founded in 1997, the company has a current market cap of Rs. 5,874.53 crore (Approx.).

Most of the cyber attacks are like tsunamis. It is very tough to predict the direction and the magnitude of the attack approaching. Finding blind spots is the biggest challenge faced by the security professionals in companies nowadays. This can be eliminated by complete visibility, which is fairly nascent in India. Companies usually conduct small audit and they never test a network at full attack and application load. But by maintaining visibility into production network, these companies can monitor and maintain visibility of those networks from end-to-end to the applications running, all the way out to the edge of the networks for the users to suite that application traffic, in both physical and virtual alike.

This helps the companies from a security stand point by maintaining visibility of that entire transaction, thus eliminating the blind spots that exist there, especially in the virtual data centers. It will also enhance the performance of the network to live up to the expectations of the users' stand point.

It is about Reputation, Not Money
Most of the companies are more in a reactive mode rather a proactive mode. This is due to their lack of knowledge about the steps to be taken to prevent such incidents making them more vulnerable to cyber attacks. They wait for the event to occur, rather than fixing it up at that point of time.

One of the common areas prone to cyber attack is the Banks. Recently, the server in an established bank in India was attacked leading the server down for more than three days. The bank was more worried about the reputation tarnished than the money lost. We are working with them to test the infrastructure to make sure they are resilient to cyber attacks and also make them ready to look at the network and understand from where a cyber attack is taking place and what the signs of it are.

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