Ordr and Gigamon: Network and Device Visibility

Peter Drucker may have directed his famous adage, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” to business managers, but these words ring just as true for network and security managers. Technology leaders constantly measure and manage risk, performance, capacity, and numerous other metrics.

However, there’s an important corollary: You can’t measure what you can’t see. Without visibility, measurement and management become almost impossible.

Nowhere is this more true than with enterprise networks. They are complex, constantly evolving, and continually connecting more and more devices. Comprehensive visibility into the traffic, devices, behaviors, and risks allows network and security managers to take the key measurements needed to make smart decisions. However, hooking a multitude of “monitoring solutions” to a network can create problems with performance, SPAN/Tap availability, and complexity.

This is where Gigamon and Ordr work together to provide a comprehensive infrastructure for network and device visibility.

The Gigamon Visibility and Analytics Fabric collects full-fidelity information from your physical, virtual, and cloud network infrastructures, optimizes the traffic via de-duplication and advanced filtering, and creates a consistent and centralized interface for viewing all data in motion. This can particularly benefit complex or distributed organizations, allowing centralized monitoring of east-west (internal) traffic as well as north-south (datacenter-to-internet) traffic. Enterprises benefit from full visibility into network traffic, regardless of its origin or destination.

Ordr SCE leverages the Gigamon Visibility and Analytics Fabric to passively inventory and classify every device on a network, from traditional IT devices such as workstations, printers and servers, to IoT devices such as medical devices, building automation, and security cameras, to operational technology (OT) such as manufacturing tools, sensors, and PLCs. Ordr then takes this visibility to the next level: not just identifying network devices, but identifying their behavior, their communication patterns, and their risks.

Gigamon and Ordr joint solution

When deployed onto the Gigamon infrastructure, Ordr can be deployed more quickly, with less (or less expensive) hardware, and with less contention for SPAN or TAP ports on network switches. Additionally, Gigamon’s ability to centralize traffic often means a more comprehensive inventory of devices that are connected to complex, highly distributed networks. More visibility means better management of risks.

Interestingly, encryption adds another twist to the visibility story. While internal use of TLS improves security in many ways, it can also blind network analysis tools to the data needed to identify security breaches like advanced persistent threats (APTs), remote access trojans (RATs) and crypto mining. Gigamon Visibility and Analytics Fabric addresses this challenge too. Its TLS decryption support offers a secure window into encrypted traffic, giving Ordr complete visibility into encrypted inbound, outbound, and internal networks.

Together, Gigamon and Ordr give network, security, and business-aligned technical groups (such as clinical engineering) unparalleled visibility into enterprise networks, devices, behaviors and risks. Gigamon customers seeking to identify and protect IT, IoT, IoMT, and OT devices should schedule a free demo of Ordr SCE to see how it can quickly and easily offer new levels of visibility and security for the devices in your network. Ordr customers who wish to optimize their network visibility infrastructure can reach out to Gigamon for a demo or free trial as well.

Full visibility into network flows, devices, and network behaviors with Gigamon and Ordr makes measuring and managing your risk a straightforward task. Peter Drucker would be proud.

For more information on Gigamon and Ordr, check out our solutions brief here, and watch our See, Segment, Secure webinar here:

Bryan Gillson

Bryan joined Ordr in November 2019 after spending six years as VP Strategic Alliances at Ionic Security. At Ionic, Bryan initiated and managed business relationships with system integrators such as Accenture, Deloitte, and PwC, and closed OEM partnerships with vendors in the CASB, virtualization, and data protection sectors. Previously, Bryan led product management and business operations for Symantec’s encryption products and information protection groups after integrating the acquisitions of both PGP Corporation and GuardianEdge. Prior to Symantec, Bryan led the business development team at PGP Corp. and was a VP in Merrill Lynch’s Technology Investment Banking group.