Overview

Solera Networks develops network forensics solutions that enable complete visibility into network traffic. They improve network security, management, forensics and compliance capabilities by providing a complete historical record of all network activity through deep packet capture and stream-to-storage technology. This results in full visibility of all traffic crossing the network. Think of it as a DVR or surveillance for your network–but Solera Networks records every channel, every program, all the time.

Solutions to See Back in Time

As the trend toward surveillance in the physical world continues to grow, the need for complete visibility of all network activity (active and historical) is becoming a business necessity, especially as networks become exponentially faster and more complex. Organizations are realizing that having a complete historical record of all of their network traffic is critical to true network visibility and to ensure timely and efficient resolution of network incidents. The added visibility provided by a complete and searchable historical record of all network traffic is driving significant improvements in network security, data loss prevention, network management, performance optimization and policy and regulatory compliance.

Solera Networks’ flagship product is the DS series line of high-performance appliances (including software-only virtual appliances) that capture, record, search and archive 100 percent of network traffic, at speeds up to 10Gbps. Solera DS appliances sit passively on the network, undetected, not impacting the performance of the network in any way. Captured traffic is written to an adaptive replacement cache and presented in multiple industry-standard formats, including PCAP or as regenerated traffic delivered at recorded, throttled or accelerated playback speeds. Regenerated traffic appears to other devices or segments as normal network traffic with all original metadata.

Captured traffic is then accessible via Solera Networks’ proprietary search, alert and archive interface, or via any standards-based security, forensics, compliance, analytics or network management application, including all open-source tools. These applications can then perform their analysis on either live or captured traffic using Solera Networks’ extensive filtering language, all without affecting the production network’s performance.

The elegance of the Solera Networks’ solution is its software design and openness. Removing the reliance on custom or proprietary hardware allows for unlimited portability and offers speed and performance advances in hardware. The open platform supports all network-based applications through industry standard formats, online traffic regeneration, or extensive REST-based web services. This design supports unlimited use cases to achieve maximum return on investment for organizations, allowing them to dedicate multiple toolsets to a single traffic source versus taking existing bandwidth through inline deployments. Providing context for network security analysts while simultaneously giving network administrators instant replay of network outages makes any DS appliance the most complete network tool for achieving comprehensive network visibility.

Use Cases

• Retrospective Security Assurance
• Incident Response
• Situational Awareness
  • Targeted Surveillance
  • Independent Verification and Validation (IV&&V)
  • APT Investigation
  • Forensics DLP
  • Application, User, and Content Visualization

Challenges of Network Forensics

Capture Speed – Is your network too fast for your current capture device?

Scalability – Can you analyze hours, days, weeks, even months of captured traffic?

Deployment complexity – How many boxes will you need to meet your speed and scalability requirements?

Virtualization – Is virtualization creating blind spots in your network?

Forensics/Analytics – How do you access and make sense of all this captured traffic?

Tool Integration – Do you have analysis tools that you want to continue using?

Sample Deployment Diagram

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