Five requirements essential organisations need to ensure unstoppable digital services

Millions of people around the world depend on the online services of essential organisations – from supervising intensive care units and protecting elections, to maintaining money flow and connecting broadband communications. So, ensuring a secure and high-performing digital ecosystem is a necessity.

Maintaining world-class performance, security, and availability at enterprise scale is critical. However, as digital ecosystems become increasingly distributed and complex, point solutions that were originally designed to address targeted network use cases or isolated security problems have become inadequate to comprehensively manage issues of cyber risks, mission-critical applications, and unified communications experience.

For this reason, chief information officers (CIOs) and chief information security officers (CISOs) of essential organisations must elevate their expectations of what security, performance, and visibility solutions must do and determine how they can work better with their own teams to navigate emerging IT complexities.

Scalable network and security capabilities

As technology continues to advance and improve the efficiency of essential organisations, the increased use of computer networking systems means that the amount of internal data will grow too. Additionally, the digital networks and cybersecurity solutions used to power and protect these computer systems should also increase. This should especially be true if an organisation’s internet speeds increase to 25, 50, 100 gigabits or even further.

Any network visibility or cybersecurity solution that is unable to meet these increasing rates in both growth and speed will ultimately become obsolete. Furthermore, the organisations continuing to utilise these inadequate solutions will risk causing cybersecurity vulnerabilities and network performance disruptions throughout their IT environments, giving rise to issues that may affect their users.

Actionable data at enterprise scale

Essential organisations need to produce both broad and in-depth data of their enterprise networks to quickly determine any instabilities or complexities within their network environment. This is critical to identifying and mitigating any possible risks that may hinder their network’s performance. Once these obstacles are resolved, organisations can use the ongoing data to monitor and maintain the service quality of their networks to ensure optimal performance for their users.

Robust business analytics

For an essential organisation to truly be unstoppable, it must be able to produce highly contextual and robust business analytics generated from real-time data. This is vital in order for the organisation to quickly, yet accurately, provide answers and resolve issues regarding their digital services. This is especially true when critical national infrastructure (CNI) services and millions of online users depend on those services to operate. Therefore, the ability to generate accurate, detailed information is crucial to decision-making and problem-solving processes, particularly in times of crisis.

Real-time network analysis

Vital organisations should also conduct real-time, root-cause visibility, and automated analysis of their digital ecosystems. This is critical to identifying malicious activity within a network and must be applied across all clouds, datacentres, networks, or applications at a moment’s notice.

Cybercriminals need to connect to a company’s network in order to gain access to the critical assets they are ultimately targeting. However, in doing so, attackers also reveal themselves and cannot avoid detection once they connect to their target’s network. A root-cause visibility and automated analysis that is executed in real time can be key to identifying any underlying problems within a network, including malicious activity. In addition, this can also help companies to resolve and prevent these issues from reoccurring.

Broad network visibility

The final requirement is that the degree of visibility into an organisation’s network must be broad, encompassing everything from hybrid and legacy cloud environments, to all end users and applications. As data packets are the convergence point within a network where security and performance meet, they can allow an organisation to predict a potential network problem or a breach. Therefore, broad network visibility across all applications and networks is a vital requirement to accessing this insight, which can be achieved with the use of scalable deep packet inspection solutions.

Deep packet inspection solutions accelerate the resolution of highly complex application, cybersecurity, and network performance issues which work by precisely identifying the exact cause of the problem, as fast as possible. These tools can also be used across all aspects of an organisation’s network environment – such as on premises as well as hybrid, private, and public cloud – to ensure network performance is optimal and consistent throughout the digital ecosystem.

Customers, third-party organisations, board members, and employees continue to raise their expectations of what optimal digital services should be. Therefore, organisations must be able to meet those expectations by keeping their services running and ensure a high-quality end-user experience. However, in doing so, essential organisations today should not be forced to choose between network performance and security, as both aspects are equally as important and, at times, depend on each other. Indeed, a severe cybersecurity incident has the potential to heavily disrupt a network’s performance and service.

Unstoppable digital services

With scalable network and security capabilities, actionable data at enterprise scale and robust business analytics, paired with real-time network analysis and broad network visibility, organisations can resolve existing performance and cybersecurity issues before imposing more serious problems. Only with these five requirements can organisations ensure truly unstoppable digital services, complete with quality network performance and robust cybersecurity protection.