CISA Guidance Highlights the Need for Total Network Observability

By Craig McCullough, Public Sector SVP, Riverbed

In the wake of the pandemic, global IT managed services are exploding in popularity. Grand View Research, Inc. predicts the market will reach $731 billion in revenue by 2030, with government-centered digital transformation initiatives helping drive that growth. As a result, the demand for services has made managed service providers (MSPs) a popular target for international cybercrime.

On May 11, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA) and the FBI — alongside the cybersecurity agencies of the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, collectively known as the Five Eyes — issued new recommendations for MSPs to reduce potential cyber intrusions.

These recommendations call for MSPs to implement best practices like incorporating multi-factor authentication, maintaining six months’ worth of data logs, developing incident response and recovery plans, segregating internal critical operations and others to safeguard the data and networks of not only the service providers, but also their customers.

However, with the growing complexity of many federal agencies’ information technology environments — which can include on-premises and multi-cloud networks with different MSPs, as well as distributed workforces — officials can’t rely on best practices alone to help safeguard their networks.

As we’ve seen time and again with cyber intrusions, strong cyber hygiene is difficult to maintain across a large, distributed enterprise. Poor device management, simple passwords and unpatched vulnerabilities are persistent problems for IT managers.

To truly safeguard their networks, agencies must be able to achieve complete observability of their IT environments.

Protecting networks by knowing what’s on them

The inevitable tangle of multiple, interrelated and yet siloed systems, software applications and datasets in a federal agency ensures that its IT professionals will have difficulty getting a full view of their technology environment.

The difficulty in monitoring the technology makes enterprises a prime target for cyber criminals. Cyber risk is compounded even further by vulnerabilities that may not exist within a federal agency’s IT environment, but within the networks of its MSP(s).

For technology officials to better understand their threat posture, they need a full and unobstructed view of the health of their technology environment. That includes real-time visibility of all data across platforms; information about the health of their networks, applications and infrastructure; and automated tools to monitor and remediate common issues while staff analyze larger problems.

And while enterprises should implement best practices to help guard against and quickly recover from potential cyber intrusions, IT managers also need to have a seamless user experience by integrating their data across cloud networks, across multiple applications and a distributed workforce without compromising their cybersecurity.

Visibility starts with bridging IT complexity

Unified observability technology can provide that experience, with some solutions utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to correlate disparate data streams across IT platforms and provide actionable data on user experience, application performance and network performance.

Through continuous monitoring across IT systems, unified observability solutions can streamline operations while helping free up resources for talent-scarce and overworked IT departments.

This allows IT managers to better identify anomalies, monitor the health of their IT infrastructure and ensure application performance, all while analyzing code modifications on the network.

Alongside its capability to analyze and correlate multiple data streams, unified observability platforms can also support IT managers by deploying automated remediation tasks from a preconfigured library of actions, allowing personnel to decide when to commit manual resources toward larger problems and when to let the system address other issues.

This provides IT managers with better insights into when performance issues could potentially be cyber intrusions.

Unified observability will be a must-have tool for IT

Like the managed services market, unified observability technology is predicted to see exponential growth, with some analysts projecting a market value of $19 billion or higher by 2024.

With the complexity of multiple IT architectures and the ubiquity of new software tools, IT professionals need the ability to see and understand the activity on their networks — faster, with more accuracy and with greater efficiency. Unified observability can provide those insights, allowing enterprises to better manage their technology environments.

About the Author

Craig McCullough is the Senior Vice President of Public Sector Sales at Riverbed. Craig has been in the public sector information technology industry for 20 years, having started his career with GTSI (now UNICOM Government) and has held various leadership positions with Commvault, Hewlett-Packard and BeyondTrust. Craig holds a J.D. from the University of Baltimore School of Law, where he graduated magna cum laude in 2000. Craig is a private pilot with advanced ratings and has testified twice before Congress on aviation related issues.

Craig can be reached online @riverbed on Twitter and through Riverbed’s website: https://www.riverbed.com