Counting the Cost
Volume 9
Champions Edition tions can scale to 1000TB of data storage , that equals roughly four months of packet data history for a small / medium enterprise and less than a month for a large enterprise .
To expand the packet data history even further , the packet data can be compressed before it is written to the packet capture database . The effect of compressing the packet data depends on the selected compression algorithm and the content of the data packet , as certain data is more suited for compression than other . Standard network packet data have a typical compression ratio of three ; hence , compression can triple the packet capture history .
Counting the Cost
In the ever-increasing battle against critical data breaches , deploying packet capture capabilities is an extremely effective weapon . But as described above , a few challenges must be addressed in order to have a successful packet capture solution .
It ’ s also important to consider the financial investment required .
Use cutting-edge network acceleration technology to add real-time line rate performance to your application . The Compact 200G Accelerator NT200A01 provides full packet capture and analysis of network data at 200G with zero packet loss .
About the author :
Peter Ekner is CTO at Napatech and manages the Copenhagen team .
He has more than 15 years of experience working with the design of products and components for network equipment .
The two biggest cost drivers are the number of packet capture systems and the size of packet data history . A single packet capture system can cost up to US $ 250K , depending on the exact system configuration , and a storage solution in the PByte range could cost more than US $ 1M .
Buying packet capture capabilities is akin to buying life insurance .
You want to have the best possible coverage given the amount of money you are ready to spend . Surely the Target executive management team would have preferred such a cyber security “ life insurance ” defense solution that could have given them a quick forensic investigation of the reported data breach . The rest of us can learn from that story and avail ourselves of every possible cyber security advantage .
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