Delivering a superior digital experience begins with crystal clear visibility. When everything in an environment can be viewed, measured and monitored granularly, administrators have total control and high QoE is guaranteed. Sadly, that kind of control is becoming increasingly elusive in the distributed, disaggregated networks. At the Tech Field Day event in April, Keysight Technologies presented Keysight CyPerf, a network testing solution that quantifies unknown security and performance problems in the network helping teams be in total control of the QoS delivered.
Distributed Cloud Environments Have Some Inherent Gaps That Make Way for Security Risks
Cloud is what modern enterprises call home. A majority of businesses lives on cloud today, at least partially. And that is great because we all know how thrilling it is to be handed out the flawless experience that cloud vendors do. But businesses are starting to recognize that behind the scalability and flexibility, there is another side to cloud network that is mired with complications. It is highly distributed, and effectively borderless and like in all borderless environments, it has giant-size holes in visibility and an alarming lack of control. If allowed, this can quickly fester into poor user experience.
Security too remains a fundamental challenge to solve as companies are moving towards a cloud-first model. They can’t make progress in better user experience if they haven’t taken care of fundamentals like security and since security and user experience are intertwined, there needs to be a unified way to tackle both the problems head on.
A Purpose-Built Testing Solution is in the Order
As complex as they sound, these challenges can be easily overcome with a solution that unlocks complete visibility to the cloud traffic. Keysight Technologies, an electronic test equipment and software manufacturing company based out of Silicon Valley, understood the importance of visibility in reducing cloud security risks and unlocking superior user experience. With total visibility as their game plan, Keysight developed CyPerf, a network testing solution that delivers deep insights targeting not just security, but also performance bottlenecks and the overall user experience.
CyPerf is the “industry’s first instantly scalable Zero-Trust network test solution” that emulates real-life workloads to test their scale and performance. It works in the cloud as well as in other physical environments and hybrid networks.
Keysight CyPerf
At the Tech Field Day event in April, George Zecheru, Director of Product Management for Application Security, Keysight Technologies presented CyPerf. During the presentation, Zecheru outlined the challenges of distributed networks and gave the audience a walk-through of the capabilities of CyPerf and how using it, businesses can validate modern environments.
CyPerf is an agent-based solution that deploys test agents in the environment. These agents, lightweight and fast, can realistically emulate workloads including all the aspects of application traffic, threat vectors and user behavior for testing. As they make their way through the network, the traffic agents check and validate the security devices in the environment, zero-trust authentication policies and their implementation and overall ensure that deployments happen without hiccups.
CyPerf’s test agents are resilient and can easily work around disruptive events like cloud outages. Software-based and infrastructure agnostic, these agents allow CyPerf to be run in public cloud as well as private cloud and on-premises.
The CyPerf solution is designed to help map the attack surface and identify threat vectors in the environment. CyPerf achieves these by generating threat and application simulations that users can access through regular updates. Using these simulated scenarios, users can test the security and performance of the network in general, and the devices in particular without really exposing either to any real attack or issues.
Final Verdict
By emulating application traffic and letting the IT teams view the scenarios realistically, Keysight’s CyPerf ensures that risks and issues, whether its of performance, scalability, or security, are predicted and eliminated and business continuity is preserved. Being deployable in both pre-deployment and live production and instantly scalable make it the perfect solution to replace traditional test tools in any dynamic cloud or hybrid network.
Be sure to check out their other technical presentations from the recent Tech Field Day event to know more about Keysight’s CyPerf or try it out for free at their website.
