Gigamon Announces New Solutions For SSL Visibility And Enhancements For Multi-Tiered Security

Gigamon®

, a leader in traffic visibility solutions with the innovative Unified Visibility Fabric™, today announced the upcoming release of a new GigaSMART traffic intelligence application that provides visibility into SSL sessions. The innovative GigaSMART application will be the industry's first and only traffic visibility solution with integrated SSL support, allowing deeper insight into infrastructure blind spots to help expose hidden threats or performance issues. Gigamon also announced upcoming enhancements to its 'Active Visibility for Multi-Tiered Security' architecture detailed earlier this year as well as associated upgrades to its Fabric Manager, which will centrally administer all of these capabilities across the Visibility Fabric. These new releases will build on Gigamon's vision of pervasive traffic visibility and will significantly expand its architectural approach to its Visibility Fabric platform. Despite 25-35 percent of enterprise traffic being carried over SSL connections, many performance management and security tools today are blind to this growing network traffic segment. According to a Dec. 9, 2013 Gartner report titled "Security Leaders Must Address Threats From Rising SSL Traffic" by Jeremy D'Hoinne and Adam Hils, "Gartner believes that, in 2017, more than half of the network attacks targeting enterprises will use encrypted traffic to bypass controls, up from less than 5% today." Hackers and nefarious actors are now hiding threats, such as the Zeus botnet, in SSL sessions that were once considered safe. Consequently, uncovering attacks hiding in emerging threat sources like SSL sessions is becoming an essential component of enterprise security. With this new GigaSMART application, Gigamon will provide visibility into these sessions to enable network security and analytics tools to detect these threats. "SSL sessions are either invisible to security and performance management tools or degrade performance by up to 80% if they are processed by the tools," said Ananda Rajagopal, vice president of product line management at Gigamon. "By delivering SSL decryption as a common service to security and performance management tools, the tools can return to full performance. Further, because SSL is at the heart of today's enterprise infrastructure, endpoints and DMZ servers are potentially exposed to attacks without the right level of traffic visibility." The broad spectrum of GigaSMART applications can be 'service chained' together so that multiple visibility services can be performed in combination to address the specific needs of a range of vertical markets. With a central management system controlling all distributed devices, Gigamon customers benefit from lower cost of ownership, higher performance and improved agility. Gigamon is also announcing new capabilities for traffic consolidation, load distribution and redundancy to its "Active Visibility for Multi-Tiered Security" architecture, which was announced earlier this year. Using Application Aware Bypass, traffic can now be selectively sent to inline security tools based on specific applications of interest. The efficiency of inline bypass can now be further enhanced with many-to-many and many-to-one traffic consolidation from multiple network links. Other enhancements allow redundancy for serial inline tool configurations to be bolstered with the ability to bypass unhealthy tools without affecting the production network. These capabilities are available to order now and will be generally available later this quarter.