Delivering secure applications to end-users is an increasingly complex task. The ransomware threat from cybercriminals has been in the news frequently in the last year. Plus, other cyberthreats haven’t gone away completely. Coupled with the need to provide robust security monitoring on networks is the existing requirement to ensure that applications are always available and performing at an optimal level. Not much is as frustrating to customers or staff as an application that is slow to respond.
Both of these parts of the application experience are getting more complex over time. The threat landscape is constantly changing, and now the way people use applications is also changing at an increased rate. The switch to mass home working in 2020 is resulting in a new hybrid working model. IT teams will need to deliver infrastructure and applications that people can use irrespective of location.
Network Monitoring Tools Are Essential
To provide this location-agnostic but secure application experience for end-users means that applications get used over multiple network types. Such as main office wired & wireless networks — branch office networks on SD-WAN or Internet connections — mobile users on cellular networks — home users on broadband WiFi — plus many other locations and connection types with varying levels of security and bandwidth.
The adage “you can’t manage what you can’t see” is appropriate when dealing with this diverse network provision. To ensure that all parts of the network are secure and efficient requires that network monitoring is in place to show what’s occurring in real-time.
This is what network performance management tools provide. There are many such tools on the market for organizations to choose. Most focus on one aspect of the overall monitoring picture — either security or network performance monitoring. Both are required and selecting a set that shows the big picture can be challenging.
The Enterprise Management Associates Radar Report
Industry analysts and think tanks produce research and reports to help enterprise organizations investigate and select suitable technology solutions. One such analyst company is Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) who produce a series known as Radar Reports.
Their 2021 EMA Radar Report on Network Performance Management tools aims to assist IT organizations that are procuring network performance management solutions for operational monitoring, troubleshooting, and capacity planning. It outlines the offerings from multiple vendors in the security and network performance monitoring space, with advice on which to choose and why it may be the best fit for a particular organization.
Kemp Flowmon Solution Radar Report Highlights
With the LoadMaster load balancers and the Flowmon Anomaly Detection System (ADS), the Kemp offering in the network monitoring tools space covers application performance and network security monitoring. This fact gets highlighted in the EMA Radar Report. They write —
Kemp Flowmon is one of the few solutions in the Radar that is expressly designed to be both a network operations tool and a security operations tool, which makes it appealing to network and security teams that are trying to consolidate and unify toolsets and improve cross-silo collaboration.
In the blog post Using Flow Data to Better Understand Your Networks and Application Experience, we outlined how Kemp Flowmon can be used to deliver a better application experience. And in this post, we outlined at a high level how flow data capture works and why it is better in almost all cases.
Some other quotes about the Kemp Flowmon solution in the EMA Radar Report include (edited for conciseness):
- Kemp Flowmon received strong to outstanding scores for overall product architecture. It’s quite scalable … with strong platform performance scores. Its data retention capabilities are also strong.
- Support for integration with all leading SIEM solutions. It also includes a fully documented REST API, which customers can use to implement their own integrations.
- Kemp positions its suite as a solution that is easy to deploy and can provide visibility into physical, virtual, and cloud networks. It also includes an automated root cause analysis engine that can derive possible sources of trouble from packet data.
- Kemp Flowmon offers an excellent balance of price with overall product strength. It’s one of the more affordable products in the Radar. Small and midsized enterprises will find it particularly affordable.
- The Kemp Flowmon solution received strong scores for Deployment and Administration in the report. It also received a good overall score for Functionality, with outstanding application classification capabilities and strong visualization, reporting, and metrics and measurement features.
- The AIOps capabilities get classified as strong, and the overall Architecture and Integration score was solid, with strong scores for data collection, scalability, and platform performance.
Customer Satisfaction
At Kemp, we value customer support to ensure that all our customers get the best value from our products. Our support teams have a 98% satisfaction rate with customers (as of October 2021). We were delighted to see this reflected in the included Customer Perspectives in the EMA Radar Report. To quote a few —
“It’s a great troubleshooting tool for getting a deep-dive view.”
“I really like the people at Kemp Flowmon. They give you suggestions that are above and beyond what’s required. They don’t act like they want to sell you the product; they want to help you use it efficiently.”
“They are customer-oriented. The product evolves in the direction that customers want it to.”
“Its ability to search all the headers and data in your network for anomalies works very well.”
Conclusion
In addition to the operational highlights mentioned above, the Kemp Flowmon solution scored as a Value Leader in the EMA Radar Report.
We strive to create the tools to allow organizations to deliver the best application experience to their end-users in a secure and performant way. Providing this in a platform that is also the best value for our customers is our focus. Contact us today to find out how we can work together to make your end-user application experience fantastic.
