Why is East-West NetworkTraffic Monitoring important?

Hello everyone. One of the common questions we get from users is around monitoring the lateral movement of network traffic within the Data Center, which is basically in the east-west direction. Traditionally IT teams have been more focused on monitoring north-south traffic for security challenges that may exist in the environment. IN a recent survey that was conducted by Uila, 4 out of 5 IT network folks told us that they are either not monitoring east-west traffic or only do that sometimes.

This is a big issue, as you know this is not only important for performance monitoring, but also for cyber threat detection. On the Performance side, you do want to know as part of the multi-tier architecture, how the traffic is flowing between the dependencies. So that when a problem occurs, you know which asset is the main contributor to the outage or slowdown. Also, if you are planning to migrate to the cloud and the dependencies will span cloud boundaries in the future, you need to know the east-west traffic so that those dependencies continue after the migration and can also help in cost estimations of moving workloads to the cloud. 

On the security side, the threat landscape has changed in the last couple of years with malwares moving in the east-west direction within the Data Center. They enter in the stealth mode, and then penetrate deeper within your environment by moving laterally and compromising as many devices as they can. To be able to identify these east-west movements in a timely manner is key to not only identify the threats early, but also get visibility into other critical business assets that maybe under threat from these attacks.

Network Analysis tools can be a very effective method to identify these lateral movements quickly, as they have complete visibility into all the packets and patterns in the environment. If the tool has an application-centric view, that is even better, as it helps networking teams focus on issues or applications that are critical to the organization.

If you want to talk to one of our experts on any question or how to monitor your east-west network traffic, please click to get in touch with us. 

Uila also offers a 21-day Assessment program that is designed to provide an assessment of the health of the entire stack in your environment. As part of this assesment, the Uila expert will install the agentless, non-disruptive, application & infrastructure-agnostic Uila solution in your environment, analyze the results, provide the observations & recommendations on a 1 on 1 phone call, plus provide the final assessment report at the end for you to share with the rest of your team, or use to solve the challenges observed in your environment. Request your assessment NOW.