Martello BLOG

Make Sure Your Network Is Top Of The Class This Year

Now that school is back in session, it’s a good time to head back to the books for a refresher course on how you can make sure your network is ready to handle your needs as we head into a busy fall season.

Here is your cheat sheet to make sure your network is top of the class for the coming year:

Network Performance Management– Prevent, detect, troubleshoot and address performance problems on unified communications networks, including delay, jitter, packet loss and poor voice quality.

SD-WAN Solutions– Transform aging networks to build an affordable, resilient WAN infrastructure across multiple circuits and VPNs for business continuity and enhanced network performance.

IT Analytics Visualization– Integrate and control all your existing monitoring, cloud and service management tools with clean and personalized dashboards that can be accessed anywhere, from any device.

Download the Cheat Sheet

Martello is no stranger to helping schools around the world solve their network and IT problems. Martello helps education institutions like Anderson University and Pomperaug Regional School District keep up with the growing demand for online courses, central administrative offices and peer-to-peer file sharing.

The Martello solution can be the catalyst for accelerated technology adoption, and what better place to do that then in the education system. With SD-WAN solutions to help meet demand and lower costs, schools can see more for their money and help propel students into a higher level of learning. With our unified communications performance management, you can rely on around-the-clock reliable communications to keep students and staff connected.

“Within a week of deployment, Mitel Performance Analytics solved a voice quality problem we had struggled with for 6 months. The detailed voice quality data in Martello’s solution differentiates it from other management systems and ensures voice quality problems don’t persist.”

– Pomperaug District School Board

Using network visualization tools, IT administrators will have the ability to have an insightful, efficient and consolidated view of the entire IT environment, making it easy to keep track of multiple servers and monitoring services. The Martello solution just makes sense when you’re thinking about how educational institutions can improve their system for the busy fall term.

While you may not be heading back to school yourself, it’s a good idea to take a refresher course from Martello University and learn how you can improve your network performance. Check out our eBook on Hybrid Cloud and learn how you can optimize your cloud environment and mitigate your risks of relying solely on the cloud to run your business. See how you can harness the power of top notch voice quality with our Voice Quality eBook. Don’t let your network get tripped by an outage. Watch our video to see how Martello delivers business continuity while be surrounded by uncertainty.

Have you done a network check to ensure that you’re ready to take on the tasks of today and tomorrow? Check out our blog with 7 problems to watch for that could be lurking in your network.

The Overlooked Vulnerabilities of Secure SD-WAN

Software-Defined WAN is on everyone’s lips, lately. It’s a fresh new take on the Wide Area Network (WAN) which allows enterprises and small businesses alike to break away from rigid connectivity contracts, simplify their network infrastructure and access their hosted resources more easily.

Recently, the Secure SD-WAN trend has started to emerge: the convergence of security and networking into a single product offering. The capacity to house a next generation firewall, a router and a link balancer under one roof is a great feat and, at first glance, a great savings opportunity. It may not be as secure as advertised, however.

Bundling network functions together sounds like the logical thing to do, until you realize that it effectively creates a massive single point of failure. This, in turn, is as good as a glowing target on your edge appliances for cyber-attacks.

There isn’t a week that goes by without news of a new security breach identified on some of the market’s leading networking vendors who boast an integrated suite of solutions: authentication bypass ¹,², encryption interference ³, remote code execution ⁴, information exposure ⁵,⁶, command injections ⁷. The list goes on. Many of these vulnerabilities are resolved swiftly with patches and updates, but how does that help you, if the damage is already done?

All these issues occur because the WAN edge appliance in question is visible to the outside world, and can therefore be targeted and its vulnerabilities exploited.

Martello’s best-of-breed Layer-2 approach

Martello’s WAN edge solution integrates at Layer-2, or the data link layer (OSI model), and not at Layer-3 or Layer-4 (network and transport layers), like most competing solutions (whether secure or not). Instead of terminating sessions, Martello inspects and forwards on the fly, without the firewall or ISP router ever being the wiser. Traffic flows through seamlessly, without ever being interrupted. This makes it transparent, and invisible to the outside world.

This is because the network interfaces on Martello’s edge appliance do not show IP addresses. Consequently, they are also invisible to attackers and do not share the vulnerabilities plaguing other products. Even when running a scan of your network infrastructure, hackers would be unable to detect the devices.

As such it’s also agnostic to pre-existing network devices including next generation firewalls, allowing you to leverage the benefits of a SD-WAN architecture without having to sacrifice the security setup you’re already comfortable with.

When it comes to your network, it’s safer to leverage best-of-breed solutions like Martello’s offerings. Secure SD-WAN solutions are either specialized in security, or in networking, and will either fail to keep your network up and running or leave you exposed and vulnerable.

Want to learn more about our SD-WAN solutions? Visit us at Booth #08 at the SD-WAN Summit in Paris, France next month!

References:

1 https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20190806-sb220-auth_bypass

2 https://www.securityfocus.com/bid/92781/discuss

3 https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/08/15/critical-new-bluetooth-security-issue-leaves-your-devices-and-data-open-to-attack/

4 https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20190806-sb220-rce,

5 https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/724487/

6 https://meraki.cisco.com/blog/cisco-meraki-customer-advisories/

7 https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20190806-sb220-inject

Best Practices To Improve Your IoT Network Performance

Your IoT capabilities are only as powerful as your network. Without a solid network foundation, you won’t produce an Internet connection that has the capacity to handle cutting edge smart technology, including the Internet of Things (IoT). This includes real-time applications such as voice and video streaming, online gaming and file sharing.

IoT network performance begins to dwindle when you have real-time traffic applications competing for the same bandwidth. Whether you are live streaming voice or video, using file sharing services or participating in online gaming, these applications require constant internet bandwidth to maintain their services. This issue becomes more critical when you are looking at IoT applications such as autonomous vehicles and emergency dispatch systems. If there is a delay, no matter how small, it could risk public safety. By taking steps to ensure the network can handle several real-time applications at the same time, you can ensure that your business is ready for the next phase of IoT.

The best ways to improve IoT network performance include:

1.Leverage bandwidth aggregation using link balancers

Link management and balancing is a mature technology component that any organization relying on the Internet needs to take a critical look at adopting, especially in the new age of IoT. With faster bandwidth available at lower costs, it has become very easy with the help of Layer-2 link balancers to bring a new level of performance, resilience, uptime and reliability.

Why is this so effective?

By setting your network up with dynamic routing and seamless path selection between multiple links from different ISPs and technologies, you can make the most out of the bandwidth you’re working with.

2. Aggregate that traffic to a Cloud using compatible technologies

By using a cloud instance to interface with on-premise equipment, an organization can build up their business continuity strategy. These virtual link balancers aggregate and optimize links from multiple providers and technologies, dynamically and without requiring any changes to either firewall or configuration, or IP address migration, which provides a faster, more reliable access to applications and services hosted in the Cloud.

Why is this so effective?

These virtual solutions are flexible, so they can be made to fit within an organization’s network without having to reconfigure existing hard and software. Deploying a solution like Martello’s Cloud Connector gives you the option to set it as a VPN Hub, Private Cloud Gateway or a Business Continuity Site for hosted web services.

3. Separate the traffic onto different networks to prevent competition between the two

Essential traffic can be sent through its own dedicated instance. By logically dividing your network appliance into multiple instances (eg. Martello’s Virtual Forwarder Interfaces, or VFIs), organizations can forward traffic through two or more separate interfaces without any crossing over at any point. By dividing up this traffic onto different networks you don’t have to worry about degradation caused by applications competing for bandwidth, as each instance uses its own circuits.

Why is this so effective?

When IoT applications aren’t competing for bandwidth they’re able to run smoothly and without delay. This is important for critical applications such as autonomous vehicles and emergency response systems.

4. Inspect and prioritize traffic according to business priorities

With the overwhelming growth of demands, organizations face an uphill battle at providing bandwidth to satisfy the needs to the business. With the growing demands of IoT it’s important to be able to set traffic priorities to ensure business critical applications are running smoothly. Take control of your existing bandwidth and fully saturate its effectiveness by using traffic shaping and segmentation.

Why is this so effective?

Using solutions that can help you prioritize traffic will help bring order to the bandwidth chaos and ensure that essential services are receiving the network power that they require.

One thing to consider about IoT objects; they do not connect directly to the Internet. All of their sessions go through your LAN, or WiFi, and all that traffic goes out to the Internet through the same place. It’s very important to make sure that the network equipment handling that traffic can sustain the throughput and the increasing number of sessions generated by these devices.

Free SCOM Management Packs

Documentation

Featured News

Martello BLOG

Make Sure Your Network Is Top Of The Class This Year

The Overlooked Vulnerabilities of Secure SD-WAN

Martello’s best-of-breed Layer-2 approach

References:

Best Practices To Improve Your IoT Network Performance

1.Leverage bandwidth aggregation using link balancers

Why is this so effective?

2. Aggregate that traffic to a Cloud using compatible technologies

Why is this so effective?

3. Separate the traffic onto different networks to prevent competition between the two

Why is this so effective?

4. Inspect and prioritize traffic according to business priorities

Why is this so effective?

MARTELLO – Ontario, Canada

MARTELLO – Quebec, Canada

MARTELLO – New York, USA

MARTELLO – Texas, USA

MARTELLO – Paris, France

MARTELLO – Amsterdam, NL

Solutions

Products

Partners

Resources

Support

CONNECT

About Us