In today's connected, data-driven world, business success relies on delivering dependable digital services. Data is crucial for services and decisions, and it all travels through the network.
As organizations expand, networks become larger and more complex making it increasingly difficult to find and fix issues. This complexity can cause outages, bad customer experiences, or compliance problems.
Additionally, digital transformation (moving apps to the web and mobile) has increased mainframe workloads and highlighted the need for strong network performance. And at the same time, the mainframe workforce is shrinking as experts retire—leaving IT generalists to manage mainframe networking alongside other duties (often without specialized expertise).
So, the question becomes: How do we address these challenges while bolstering enterprise network security?
Addressing Network Security Challenges
That’s where NetMaster® Network Intelligence comes in. NetMaster is a powerful tool with features specifically designed to help you manage and monitor the security of your enterprise network. It can also secure large-scale network infrastructures, providing deep visibility and leveraging machine learning and automation to help find and fix problems proactively.
NetMaster simplifies daily tasks like monitoring devices and connections, giving you a clear intelligent view of your network's overall health. The solution gathers historical data to help spot unusual activity early and includes SmartTrace for faster and easier troubleshooting. It also can automate file transfers for critical apps and tracks performance from a business perspective to enable you to meet your service goals.
Other key capabilities include:
- Instant notifications for network security events, allowing you to catch suspicious activity as it happens
- Use of machine learning and historical data to identify unusual patterns that may signal a breach or insider threat
- Monitoring the encryption status of mainframe connections in real time, helping you enable data to be protected and compliant with regulations
- Visualizing and managing mainframe connections, including volume and patterns of network traffic and the security protocols used to secure the connections.
- Providing rapid packet tracing, which is essential for diagnosing issues that could be related to security incidents
- Integration with and sharing of critical network data with your mainframe security tools assists to reduce blind spots in overall security operations
Navigating Digital Certificates
Customers and organizations are also facing critical challenges surrounding the management of third-party digital certificates, largely driven by more frequent certificate renewal requirements and the increasing scale of digital infrastructure. Lifespans for TLS/SSL certificates are rapidly shortening, creating a "perfect storm" for operational teams who must now manage renewals nearly ten times more often than in previous years.
Unfortunately, many organizations lack a centralized certificate inventory, leading to "hidden" and non-compliant certificates. In fact, research shows that many organizations may not know exactly how many certificates they have or where they are located. Many organizations have experienced unplanned service disruptions due to expired certificates or configuration errors.
NetMaster’s security-centered features can address these challenges, too.
Get the Most Out of NetMaster: Announcing a Network Security Workshop
Of course, the first step to making use of NetMaster’s existing features is learning how to configure and use them. That’s why the engineering and education teams at Broadcom are collaborating to prepare and provide a Network Security Workshop to help.
This four-hour session targets Mainframe Network Engineering teams and management but will also be useful for operations staff and auditors. The more these audiences know about network security, and how to mitigate risks using state-of-the-art and well-supported tools such as NetMaster, the easier it will be for your teams to do what they must to keep mainframe connections secure.
The Network Security Workshop will consist of several instructor-guided activities designed to equip you with the knowledge and expertise to leverage prime NetMaster security features. Participants will use a fully functional NetMaster product installation hosted by Broadcom for a hands-on approach to learning. By the end of the workshop, you will be able to:
- Navigate to and understand NetMaster displays containing IBM® zERT data. This data describes how connections on your mainframe are secured, and NetMaster provides several displays throughout the product showing summaries and more detailed descriptions of how individual connections are or are not secured. In addition to showing, you this data in the NetMaster product, we’ll introduce how we’re bringing this same information to our mainframe observability platform called WatchTower which is designed to simplify and streamline how you monitor and manage your mainframe operations.
- Configure different types of security-centric event detectors within NetMaster. These event detectors are specifically designed to provide easy to understand alerts with the data and insight you need to detect and more quickly resolve cases of security non-compliance, certificate expiry, and other issues. We will show you how to manage and view these alerts both in the NetMaster Alert Monitor as well as in the Alert Insights capability in the WatchTower platform.
- Use SmartTrace to diagnose security-related issues such as TLS handshake failures. If you’re familiar with network packet tracing, you’re aware that pinpointing packets related to specific incidents can be cumbersome and time consuming. The deluge of data you are presented with can be intimidating, but in this workshop, we’ll teach you how to customize SmartTrace with the appropriate filters to gather only the packets you need to see to get to the bottom of an issue and resolve it quickly and efficiently.
Pivot to a Proactive Avoidance Strategy
In today's complex, data-driven environment, managing network security and the proliferation of digital certificates is challenging. As the mainframe workforce shrinks, IT generalists need powerful tools.
With the right tools, like NetMaster, you can secure your enterprise network and transition from reactive recovery toward a more proactive avoidance. And you can intelligently address issues and expand automation within your mainframe environment incrementally, capitalizing on the tools you already possess and amplifying the value of your mainframe investments.
If these skills sound like useful additions to the arsenal of tools you already use as you navigate through these constantly changing requirements for network security, the Network Security Workshop is for you.