Why Monitoring Flow Data Means You’re Only Seeing Half the Picture

The role of visibility in detecting and addressing potential network problems (whether that be an attack or something more benign, such as a misconfiguration) is certainly not a new concept. In the past, network administrators and security teams often kept track of what was happening on their network by using data from Cisco NetFlow or one of its many third-party variations (collectively referred to as “flow data” in this article).

However, over time, companies’ operating environments have become more decentralized and expanded exponentially, introducing a big-data problem to the ingestion and monitoring of flow data. Not only is finding small anomalies within these reams of data like finding a needle in a haystack, but it can also be prohibitively .... ( Read the Full Article )