“As shown in our State of the Network study, corporate network teams are spending more time and resources than ever before combating security threats. They are not only facing a growing number of attacks, but hackers are also becoming increasingly sophisticated in their methods and malware,” said Douglas Roberts, Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise & Cloud Business Unit at Viavi Solutions. “Managing these types of advanced and persistent security threats requires planning, resources, and greater visibility across the network to ensure that threat intelligence is always readily available.”.
 
Highlights from the 2017 study include:
 
• Network team member involvement in security issues: 88% of respondents say they are involved in resolving security issues. Of these, almost 80% reported an increase in time spent on these issues, from nearly three hours out of four, reaching up to 10 hours per week dedicated to the topic.
• Evolution of security threats: When asked how the nature of security threats has changed in the past year, IT teams identified an increase in malware attacks via email and browsers (63%) and an increase in threat sophistication (52%). Nearly one in three also reported an increase in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
• Main sources of security perception: Syslogs were cited by almost a third of respondents as the main method for detecting security issues, followed by long-term packet capture and analysis (23%) and performance anomalies (15%).
• General factors driving network team workload: Broadband usage in businesses continues to grow, with two out of three respondents expecting broadband demand to increase by 50% in 2017. This trend is, in turn, accelerating the adoption of emerging technologies, including software-defined networking (SDN), public and private clouds, and 100 Gbps. Network teams are managing these significant initiatives while also grappling with an aggressive increase in security concerns.
 
“A combination of new technology adoption, accelerating traffic growth, and increasing security risks has created unprecedented challenges across the enterprise market,” said Shamus McGillicuddy, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. “The need to detect and address security threats is especially complicated by today’s diverse mix of enterprise traffic, which spans virtual, public, and hybrid cloud environments, as well as physical servers.”.
 
Key learnings: What should IT service teams be doing?
 
• Knowing your "normal" – recognizing abnormal traffic is crucial for identifying an ongoing attack or security issue. Start by comparing network traffic and behavior at points over time, either manually with the freeware analyzer Wireshark or using automated benchmarking in commercial network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD) tools.
• Speed ​​Discovery with Traffic Testing – According to the recent Mandiant M-Trends report, the average number of days attackers were present on a victim's network before being detected is still 146 days, despite the use of IDS and other traditional security tools. By using packet capture with retrospective analysis, network teams can go back to the time(s) of the incident(s) and analyze exactly what the hackers accessed.
• Ensuring long-term packet retention – For high-traffic applications in business, data centers, or security forensics, a purpose-built device with its own analytics capabilities may be the next step. Depending on size and volume, some devices can capture and store up to a petabyte of network traffic for later analysis, simplifying forensic investigations and enabling faster recovery.
• Facilitate effective cooperation between network and security teams - Ensure successful collaboration between network and security teams in investigations with documented workflows and integration between security, network forensics tools and performance management tools.
 
Methodology of the Global State of the Network Study
Viavi (formerly Network Instruments) has conducted its global State of the Network study for 10 consecutive years, delving into network trends and painting a picture of the challenges facing IT teams. The questions were developed based on interviews with network professionals and IT analysts. The results were compiled from the insights of 1,035 respondents—nearly 40 percent more than in the 2016 study—including network engineers, IT directors, and CIOs from around the world.

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