The Need for Active Visibility

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Managers planning technology infrastructure in modern organizations face unrelenting pressures:

To be flexible and adaptable
To do more with less
To protect their companies, customers and employees from security attacks
To maintain adequate controls and compliance

In order to meet these business challenges, many companies have adopted new IT technologies without
considering the implications on network-wide visibility, security and performance.
Consider these facts:
More than 70% of server work loads are virtualized1
Over three quarters of datacenter traffic is between these servers, making datacenter traffic harder to see
and manage2
Growing use of SSL to encrypt traffic for privacy actually obscures traffic for security and performance
monitoring
The gap in overall IT visibility into infrastructure challenges is most profoundly reflected in the finding that
75% of issues are identified first by end users, not by IT3

The impact of all of these technologies has added more layers of complexity, inhibiting visibility for
administrators and reducing the visibility of the IT organization.

Three principles for building Active Visibility into modern networks

These challenges, coupled with the limitations of using legacy approaches to visibility, lead us to three
key principles for building Active Visibility into modern infrastructures. Gigamon has pioneered the
concept of building a unified Visibility FabricTM around these ideas:
Security you cannot secure what you cannot see
Pervasiveness for security to be comprehensive, network visibility must be pervasive, whether the network
is physical or virtual
Intelligence Active Visibility provides the intelligence needed for real-time traffic data collection and
context-aware insights about network performance

The benefits of Gigamon Active Visibility and Unified Visibility Fabric

Gigamons unified Visibility Fabric enables Active Visibility by tapping the physical and virtual network and
distributing intelligent nodes throughout the network. These nodes can perform critical
real-time packet manipulation and align the right traffic with the right solutions to improve application and
network performance management, security and customer experience management.

Active Visibility enables IT to evaluate new tools without impacting production networks, thereby
shortening technology evaluation cycles and the time to deployment. With Active Visibility, networks gain
flexibility to grow and adopt new technologies.
Gigamons unified Visibility Fabric and Active Visibility enable companies to confidently adopt
new IT technologies without sacrificing network-wide visibility, intellegence, security and agility.
To learn how your organization can benefit from Active Visibility, please read the full whitepaper.

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Gartner: Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure

Cisco Systems Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology
3
ZK Research
1
2

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ES-The-Need-for-Active-Visibility-Executive-Summary-1021-01
Date 01/15