Network analytics can be a rich source of intelligence about infrastructure performance, efficiency, security and operations. Given enterprise reliance on connectivity for everything from internal communications and customer service to production, analyzing network traffic from various sources can yield insights into key patterns and trends.
As a result, network analytics use cases can illustrate how organizations have been able to troubleshoot configuration issues and improve network efficiency. IT professionals can also apply network analytics to cut operational costs and identify potential security threats.
3 essential network analytics use cases
Deriving the maximum benefit from network analytics requires IT professionals to capture data from disparate sources across the infrastructure and then correlate it to gain an end-to-end view of patterns. This process requires merging data from different systems. While this is often complicated, it enables network professionals to address important network analytics use cases, such as the following:
- Performance optimization and capacity planning.
- Credential misuse.
- Cloud security.
Performance optimization and capacity planning
When done effectively, network analytics reveals crucial information about hidden bottlenecks and other network design issues that can choke traffic and impede productivity. To illustrate one of the benefits of network analytics use cases, companies find that applying that data to gauge ongoing performance optimization could return even greater dividends.
IT organizations can use historical pattern information to anticipate future capacity requirements and potential performance issues. By tapping into this data, IT organizations can rebalance network loads, expand capacity and make configuration changes to better adjust to communication requirements.
Credential misuse
Network analytics can also shed light on security issues, applying network telemetry data alongside other data sources to accelerate the discovery of anomalous patterns indicative of threats. Credential misuse, which is often difficult to detect through manual human analysis, can be spotted much more quickly when comparing abnormal behavior against a normal baseline.
Network analytics can flag unusual actions, such as multiple login tries from different devices or attempts to connect to a network resource from an unexpected device.
If a breach has occurred, IT professionals can use network analytics to expedite the discovery of which assets the rogue user was granted access to and what data could be compromised. Expedited breach identification can help prevent future losses and mitigate the consequences of the theft.
Cloud security
IT organizations can also use flow logs from third-party cloud environments to get more insight into activity in their on-demand environments, a good example of network analytics use cases. Network analytics from the cloud can help organizations track performance and make more accurate capacity-planning decisions for commissioning and decommissioning of cloud resources based on dynamic usage requirements. Cloud network analytics can also shed light on potential security threats or possible vulnerabilities.
The value of network analytics use cases
It's important for enterprises to recognize use cases for network analytics tools. Use cases not only demonstrate the value of network analytics but also show where and how the tools excel. Network analytics help organizations evaluate network performance and identify anomalies. Moreover, when the network performs as expected, organizations can gather information about its behavior to optimize performance, improve troubleshooting and strengthen security.
Amy Larsen DeCarlo has covered the IT industry for more than 30 years, as a journalist, editor and analyst. As a principal analyst at GlobalData, she covers managed security and cloud services.
