Cyber Defense eMagazine May 2019

The Critical Role TAPs Play in Network Security and Resiliency
By Alastair Hartrup, CEO, Network Critical
Networks continue to be under persistent attack. As a matter of fact, according to CyberEdge's 2019
Cyberthreat Defense Report, the percentage of organizations breached in the past year increased to 78
percent year-over-year. Worse, 32 percent of businesses reported being breached more than 6 times in
the last 12 months, up from 27 percent in the previous year.
These attacks take many forms including phishing, ransomware, trojans, DDoS and other destructive
malware. And, the motivations for these attacks are as disparate as the threats themselves. Bad actors
are perpetrating attacks for financial gain, political influence, competitive advantage and sometimes just
to rage against the system. Whatever the motivation, hacking is a significant problem that’s impacting
productivity and costing organizations billions of dollars every year. Despite all of this troubling news,
progress is being made to combat network attacks.
The growth in criminal attacks on networks is paralleled by significant growth and technological advances
in the cybersecurity appliance industry. There are many specialized network tools that help reduce the
threat landscape by identifying and blocking attacks. For example, Data Loss Protection solutions, Next
Generation Firewalls and Unified Threat Management Appliances, Network Analytics platforms, ID and
Encryption appliances, and more. In addition, AI and machine learning technologies are making
advances in processing millions of security events, new predictive analysis technologies are identifying
known threats, and advanced network monitoring appliances are providing traffic flow visibility and
analysis.
But ensuring visibility is becoming more challenging as networks move away from centralized
architectures. Cloud, hybrid-cloud and remotely hosted applications are driving new types of business
activity. Interconnection between users and the remotely hosted information they seek requires multiple
links to the internet, corporate intranets, data centers and cloud carriers. It’s no longer economically
feasible to attach every security appliance directly to every single network link.
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