Telcordia has released the highlights from a new research that reveals the greatest challenges enterprise IT departments face. These include managing the configurations and security postures on network devices across a globally dispersed IP infrastructure.
Telcordia (News - Alert) develops fixed, mobile and broadband communications software and services.
The new white paper named "IP Network Configuration and Vulnerabilities: What You Don't Know Can Hurt You" describes IP network vulnerabilities due to lapses in security, compliance and proper configuration. It also highlights the need for solutions like Telcordia IP Assure, a scalable, non-intrusive software solution that detects and helps to rectify configuration errors in IP network devices.
The white paper details how misconfigured infrastructure, unknown ingress/egress points and basic vulnerabilities to core networking equipment threaten business continuity and affect organizations' bottom lines. According to the Open Security Foundation, 37 organizations lost almost 132 million sensitive records through external hacks in 2009. This underscores the need for a safeguarding technology for large organizations. IP Assure will continually analyze IP networks in their entirety and deliver real-time, multi-level, multi-protocol views and topologies. It uses Telcordia algorithms and a large built-in rules database to perform automatic, non-intrusive analysis of all IP routers, switches and firewall.
According to Phil Hochmuth, senior analyst at Yankee Group (News - Alert), the research firm that authored the whitepaper, more and more organizations are opening their networks to external business partners, suppliers, contractors and customers. This increased connectivity in turn introduces more complexity, which creates management and operational challenges for network and security operations teams. Hence these teams need a solution that offers a complete view of the state of the network, including compliance, network vulnerability mitigation, traffic/infrastructure engineering and application troubleshooting.
IP Assure helps organizations to improve the security and operations of their IP networks, including a high-profile branch of the U.S. Federal Government where severe security breaches and compliance issues were detected and eliminated. In a release, Adam Drobot, CTO & president of Advanced Technology Solutions (News - Alert) at Telcordia, said with IP Assure, enterprises can measure by-the-hour or by-the-minute data on revenue or productivity lost if their critical network connections go down. IP Assure provides reporting on vulnerability and policy compliance, diversity and fault tolerance, multilevel topology, service flows between nodes and networks, the impacts of configuration changes as well as recommended remedial actions.