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ExtraHop is a prime product for Tabula Rosa. It is a proven
tool for many companies to analyze their transactions through their networks and applications. Some
of the key elements are mentioned below. For anyone interested in the
product, please contact Tabula Rosa through the methods mentioned below.
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The
Problem
The
operations and systems administration staff of a 250-employee medical device
manufacturer were tasked with maintaining the company's cloud-based
applications to understand usage patterns, resource consumption, and to protect
against unauthorized use of unsanctioned applications.
The
IT team didn't know all applications in use, the total amount of traffic
consumed by their cloud and SaaS based applications, had no visibility into
end-user performance, and didn't have the visibility to segment on-premises
from cloud-based applications. They depended exclusively on their SaaS and
cloud providers for performance information, found troubleshooting difficult,
and had significant concerns regarding compliance and data loss through
applications like file sharing services. They also found capacity planning a
challenge because they lacked a comprehensive picture of application resource
consumption.
Desired
Outcome
·
A simple way to discover and measure
SaaS and cloud-based applications
·
Information that would definitively
show resource consumption by type
·
A means for continuous observation
to prevent unsanctioned applications
·
Information on SaaS user performance
and usage for better SLA management
The
IT department realized that these cloud applications posed a serious
vulnerability of data leakage, a vulnerability completely out of their hands.
They needed to proactively investigate this shadow IT issue but without causing
disruption to employees.
The
Solution
The
company deployed the ExtraHop platform behind a proxy that could decrypt their
SaaS-based applications. Extending ExtraHop's Cloud Application Bundle, they
quickly began measuring total transactions, performance, and bandwidth
consumption on a per application as well as a per cloud category perspective.
The
teams created cloud- and SaaS-specific dashboards correlated with internally
observed behavior, creating a central source of information that exposed not
only all requests, bytes, error codes and rates, but also provided definitive evidence
showing performance from their users' perspective, not the SaaS provider's
perspective. They modified their dashboards to be able to view end-user
performance today compared to seven days ago, so they had an early warning
system if their SaaS applications and end-user experience was trending
positively or negatively.
They
did the same with their on-premises based applications so they could compare
and contrast resource consumption by application type. Not only could they
diagnose top consumers that could be causing congestion and performance issues
but they now had the trend data to inform future capacity needs.
Finally,
they added a list of unsanctioned applications to their ExtraHop bundle as a
proactive means to identify and act on any unauthorized activity. The
compliance team and the CSO were relieved to know that they now had a proactive
means to identify and act on any unauthorized activity.
User
Impact
Instead
of reactively responding to performance issues and being wholly dependent upon
the SaaS provider, they were now in control and could hold their providers
accountable which the CIO found invaluable. For the first time they had a means
to definitively eliminate their own environment as the source of the problem
and could identify the specific resources (URIs) that were degraded and
correlate that with their overall network performance and utilization by all
other applications.
The
Director of IT Operations estimated that they've saved over 200 personnel hours
annually in unproductive SaaS troubleshooting efforts. The manufacturer was
able to demonstrate that 80 users accessed this application only a few times a
year so they were able to reduce several of their SaaS application license
counts, saving an estimated $20,000 per year. Usage information provided by one
of their SaaS providers was used to determine the annual license fee which was,
"a bit like the fox guarding the hen house" as the Director of IT
said. With ExtraHop's trending data the Director of IT said he feels 12 months
ahead on their planning curve. They have a complete understanding of their
capacity needs as they grow and can prepare more accurate budgets based on both
performance and usage. They can also audit all user, network and application
activity to be sure employees are using only authorized cloud file-sharing
services.
They
have started to expand ExtraHop's security monitoring capabilities—identifying
and correlating anomalous behavior focusing first on all engineering file
access by client, directory, file, frequency, and volume and correlating that
information with other user behavior like outbound activity. Not only do they
have a solid perimeter and internal controls for protection, now they can
perform real-time internal activity surveillance, putting them in a much
stronger position to protect their intellectual property.
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**Important note** - contact our sister company for
very powerful solutions for IP management (IPv4 and IPv6, security, firewall and APT solutions:
www.tabularosa.net
In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great
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Lastly, I
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product information for virtually anyone.
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