Real-time Traffic Intelligence
May 28th, 2008by Supranamaya Ranjan
Today, we issued a press release titled ‘Narus Drives Real-Time Traffic Intelligence‘. Before you even begin dreaming of circumventing the notorious silicon valley traffic with fancy real-time traffic trend gizmos, let me forewarn you - we mean ‘network traffic’.
Service providers around the world have been using the NarusInsight traffic intelligence system for a variety of applications, ranging from thwarting Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks (read Weekend of Olympic Flame and CNN attacks) to detecting illegal VoIP gateways (read PTA busts unauthorized traffic gateway). All of these applications have a common theme, to provide an accurate view of the traffic traversing a service provider’s pipes so that the provider may act up on it in real-time using the appropriate mitigation strategy.
This has become ever more important given the way user demands on bandwidth are changing. We watch more videos online than we ever did before and now the technological innovation is happening on the front of HD quality videos online. Think of the bandwidth strain that would pose on the Internet at that time. On the other hand, with the advent of Software-as-a-Service model where applications would be hosted in the cloud and users’ desktops would become thin-clients (strangely reminiscent of the old dumb terminal days), low-latency access to the applications can only be guaranteed if the network pipes are kept clean. So coming back to my point, that service providers had better be ready to prevent a complete Internet meltdown by guaranteeing that every single ‘bit’ in their network is useful. Fortunately, NarusInsight platform has been architected with this very goal in mind, where the provider can apply their own definition of unwanted traffic and clean the same using ACLs, blackholing and third party scrubbers and start seeing higher overall throughputs as well as average revenue per user.