Keysight Technologies, a leader in network test, visibility and security solutions

Tell us about acquisition of Ixia by Keysight and how does this acquisition enhance your capabilities?

The acquisition of Ixia by Keysight Technologies pairs two strong, complementary innovation companies. Keysight brings 70+ years of measurement leadership, strong worldwide presence, and proven operational discipline. Ixia brings deep expertise in IP network assessment, visibility solutions, Cybersecurity and a software-centric business team. This combination creates a global leader providing a unique range of end-to-end solutions that help our customers develop next-generation products as well as optimize and secure their networks.

What is network visibility and how is it relevant to customers in the current context? 

Network visibility is fancy way to say, “make it easy for security and monitoring teams to find issues, which could be critical Cyber security threat, and fix it.” The value of visibility comes from intelligence, not just seeing data but understanding what’s happening in the network and cloud environment.

The key drivers for visibility are security, network and application performance. An average enterprise uses 50 different network and security tools. On the other hand, the landscape is getting complex with BYOD, encryption, IoT, Cloud etc. Thanks to these developments, most enterprises have hidden network and application problems. 

Network Visibility Solutions are focused to expose these problems, eliminate blind spots, improve efficiency, reduce costs, and optimize troubleshooting efforts. Success is based upon the solution(s) we choose to implement and how well we implement them - for inline security or Out-Of-Band Monitoring. 

Can you brief us on the visibility products?

Test Access Points (TAP) provide permanent access to network traffic and allow total traffic visibility for network monitoring and security devices without introducing costly bottlenecks or points of failure.

Network Packet Brokers (NPB) deliver dynamic network intelligence to the monitoring and security tools with speed and accuracy. NPBs aggregate and filter the data sent to tools, adding intelligent grooming and security enhancements such as deduplication, SSL decryption, data masking, and application and threat intelligence. Our easy-to-use filtering engine makes it easy to identify relevant interactions, even as the network grows and changes. 

Bypass switches safeguard a network with automated failover protection, preventing temporary tool outages from escalating into costly network outages.

How do you address visibility challenges in virtualization and cloud environments? 

The environment may be virtual, but the blind spots are not. Without the ability to monitor traffic between virtual machines (VMs) in the private cloud, the security and performance management tools lack the critical data they need to identify attackers and prevent network outages. That’s what our Cloudlens addresses - to deliver complete, packet-level visibility for private clouds, enabling supply of critical packet data to the monitoring tools from virtual environments.

What is your latest offering in Cyber Security and what experience do you claim in this domain? 

Cyber security breaches have become common place, which are alarming across organizations. This along with rapid digitization and Regulatory norms are driving the need for Cyber Security.  As our reliance on data and interconnectivity swells, developing strong resilience to with stand cyberattacks has never been more important. The only way to know is to test your own defenses before hackers can. 

ThreatSimulator, a breach and attack simulation (BAS) addresses the need for continuous, comprehensive & consistent assessment (or verification) to check the effectiveness of the security posture, obtain actionable remediation steps and defend against new ways of cyber attacks and exploits. Threat Simulator platform is built on 20+ years of leadership in network security testing, having served & continue to serve the security testing needs for network equipment manufacturers. The ongoing research of our Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) team ensures regular updates so that customers have access to the latest breach scenarios and threat simulations. The ATI Service won 2020 Cybersecurity Excellence Award in the Threat Detection, Intelligence and Response category. ThreatSimulator is powered by a flexible cloud-based BAS platform that scales as networks grow.

How do you plan to take these solutions to customer pan India?

We follow a 2-tier channel model to cover the depth and breadth of customers across the country. At the 1st tier we have the Value-Added Distributors (VAD) and at the 2nd tier we have the channel partners (resellers, VARs, System Integrators) who engage with end-customers. To augment our capabilities, we have just on-boarded iValue InfoSolutions as our VAD. It gives us great pleasure to be working with one of the fastest growing technology aggregators. iValue’ s GTM strategies augers well with our product roadmap and are excited to be partnering with them. They bring in rich experience of growing businesses for many security OEMs in the country which are complimentary to the solutions we offer. 

Our Channel Xcelerate program for the channel partners is one of the best in the industry, which helps them to (a) Increase profitability and maintain competitive differentiation (b) access training, marketing, collateral, product demos, support, and the latest program information (c) Generate demand with events, campaigns, and co-branded digital marketing (d) Leverage demo equipment, sales and technical training to accelerate sales and win deals!!!