The Practicality of Packet Capture
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Network problems can be frustratingly hard to catch. How often does it happen that you call in the IT guy, only for him to watch the network activity for a while and say “Everything looks fine right now. Next time it happens, call me right away so that I can hopefully catch it.”
“Hopefully catch it.” Is this what you want to hang your network performance and security on? You can’t expect your IT guy to be a magician. Network data is ephemeral – it lives for a moment in the volatile memory of one piece of equipment or another and then it is gone. No IT professional, no matter how skilled, can conjure up the manifestation of a network problem at will. This is why periodic network monitoring is ineffective at best: unless the problem rears its head during the exact time that the technician is looking (and he/she doesn’t overlook it), that indicator of compromise, misconfiguration or misuse is gone.
Networks have no memories unless you give them one. The beauty of our IPCopper packet capture appliances is that no one has to be there to catch the suspicious TCP/IP session or malformatted packet. The appliances have large memory capacities and don’t affect network operations, so there is no reason not to deploy it now and leave it, rather than rush to put something in place to capture a problem after it has already occurred. With continuous packet capture powered by IPCopper, you just need an idea of when the problem occurred and you can go back historically in the data to figure out what happened. It doesn’t matter whether the problem happened two minutes ago, two hours ago or two months ago: the data is retained on the unit, safe and sound for when you need it.
When you get down to it, it is a poor allocation of resources to have IT jumping up at every alarm, real or otherwise, when time would be better spent on diagnosis and resolution… using data automatically and effortlessly captured.
With IPCopper, packet capture is no hassle at all. It’s practical. It’s effective. And you should be doing it already.
Specific Uses for IPCopper Packet Capture
IPCopper packet capture appliances lend themselves to a number of uses, across fields and industries and in both business and non-business network environments:
