On-Demand Webinar:Performance Testing in the Real World

Encrypted Traffic and Its Impact on Performance

A rapidly growing number of organizations demand that traffic over their networks be encrypted, in particular traffic over the Internet. Whether traffic is encrypted to harden their security posture, meet compliance requirements, or both, 70% to 80% of all Internet traffic will be encrypted and more will be in the near future.

Technology vendors have stepped up to deliver stronger and higher performance encryption capabilities as part of their solutions. Encryption technology also has evolved with the ever increasing strength of cryptography including the next version of Transport Layer Security (TLS)—standard 1.3. The evolution to TLS 1.3 will improve security and performance for network traffic, but it also brings its own challenges. Traditional threat prevention solutions cannot defend against what they cannot see. Cyber criminals hide in encrypted traffic, so organizations must decrypt traffic at network gateways in order to inspect it and know how to handle it.

Visibility into encrypted traffic comes at a cost. It requires more computational power and specific tools to inspect traffic streams. Inspection often introduces latency and, in some cases, degrades quality for traffic that is sensitive to latency. As new threat prevention solutions emerge, organizations will need to test them to ensure that they will deliver the expected results in their own networks.

Enterprises, service providers and equipment manufacturers have been asking for a security performance standard based on real-world conditions that certifies key performance metrics and allows then to perform their own tests. This on-demand webinar looks into the complexity of encrypted traffic and how to test prospective security solutions in real-world complex traffic flows to effectively mitigate the new generation of attacks.

About this On-Demand Webinar:

• Trends: Why encryption, growth of encryption
• Evolution of encryption technologies
  • From HTTP (clear text) to HTTPS and now to TLS 1.3
  • Why TLS 1.3 will improve security and performance
• New challenges that it will introduce for organizations trying to make the best security solution purchasing decisions
  • Complex encrypted traffic flows (dive into this here in more detail)
• Monitoring and modeling network traffic that in encrypted
  • High volumes of traffic (do we have a sense of how much traffic/# packets, etc. are coming through and where firewalls etc. bottleneck?) Midrange data-center solutions from primary vendors are now handling 25 to 50 Gbps of encrypted traffic
  • Costs of specific tools
  • Latency and quality degradation
• Why testing in real-world conditions can address the problem
  • Think “preemptively,” conducting preemptive testing to ensure that your security solution will perform as expected
  • Seek expert advice and resources to test your systems in a controlled environment, separate from production traffic.
  • Introduce NetSecOPEN as new direction for testing