The Lancope technology also helps Lukas protect devices on his network that he can't always patch.

"We have some devices that we can't patch or put antivirus software on because of their medical nature, and it gets a little tense," Lukas explains. "We can't always just be shutting down switch ports on these devices, because they are important for medical reasons, but knowing what's happening early helps protect them."

Reducing problems

For other technology users, network behavior analysis equips them with more knowledge and helps them reduce the time and manual labor it takes to track down and fix problems, respectively.

David Obrys, global infrastructure security coordinator at Cabot, a specialty chemicals and materials company in Boston, uses Maze Networks' Profiler product to speed response to potentially dangerous events.

"Prior to rolling this technology out, it might have taken us days to figure out what caused an event, scrambling through logs," Obrys says. "Now that it helps us understand what is right on our network, it's much easier to find what is wrong. Speed is so important when it comes to security."

James Ballou, IS security specialist and HIPAA security officer at Driscoll Children's Hospital in Texas, says with a small staff technology that automates the collection and analysis of security data helps him better secure his internal net. He uses Cisco's MARS to detect anomalies in network traffic, because the technology looks at data from different sources, gauges its potential risk and correlates it with other events on the network.

"I need proactive, consistent threat management and preprogrammed responses built into our system to mitigate issues," Ballou says.

David Arbo says his Arbor Networks Peakflow X system spots unknown variants of known viruses and worms, which is critical to the director of infrastructure services and information security at APL, a shipping company based in California.

"We have had experiences in which we are protected against the known worm, but a new variant crops up, and we don't have the profile yet," Arbo says. "The technology has provided increased visibility when that scenario crops up and lets us know if we should be blocking ports and what areas are impacted."

Arbor Peakflow X quantifies normal network behavior, analyzing flow statistics from such appliances as Cisco's NetFlow, Juniper Networks' cFlow, sFlow from Extreme Networks and Foundry Networks devices, as well as raw packet data. It uses this information to create baseline definitions of normal network behavior. Arbo says the flow data is also useful when engineering the network. Another means of protection, he explains, is network segmentation and understanding traffic flows will help him design the network for optimal security and performance.

"We leverage Arbor for analysis and information to help us put in place other active protection layers, such as perimeter firewalls, IDS and IPS tools," Arbo says. "If I can understand the traffic flows, I can know the best places where to put a gate or filter for the traffic."

Yet despite its strengths, network behavior-analysis technology could use some improvement. Arbo says he'd like to see more planning capabilities within the product to help him better gauge the impact of changes he makes to the network. While the vendors provide automated remediation features within their various products, customers need to have more confidence in the actions the products would take in response to events on their specific networks.

"A key area for these vendors is to allow customers to move faster and with a higher degree of confidence as to the outcomes their products can guarantee," Arbo says.