Wednesday, May 31, 2017

British Airways loses business due to IT failure

In light of the British Airways IT disaster, we can illustrate the failure
of updating your IT system. Not only are revenues affected from a disruption
of operations, the stock price drops are proportional to the loss of trust in
your brand.

When it happens to you, how much will it cost you?

Mission-critical IT systems require testing your power failure cut-over and
other disastrous scenarios in advance. The IT staff needs to be familiar with
the network topologies and configurations so they are prepared for any such
conditions. This is where SNMP simulation is designed to reproduce disaster
scenarios to exercise your network management environment custom policies.

MIMIC Simulator is designed for disaster preparedness. MIMIC's device
recording and simulation capabilities help to create a replica of the production
network. This virtual lab can then be used to practice disaster scenarios and
recovery procedures without affecting the production network. With MIMIC, users
can easily remove a part of the network, shutdown major routers, simulate cut
cables, increase/decrease the traffic or generate trap storms. In this way, they
can experience how their management applications react to such conditions and
practice how to respond. The participants can gain real-world experience in
disaster response.

Are you completely prepared for the disasters? If not, take a look at MIMIC
Simulator.

Monday, May 8, 2017

Simulated VOIP NetFlow flows visualized with Kibana

When you have many branch offices with a VOIP telephone system, such
as any brick-and-mortar retailer, bank, or multi-national company,
you will have a monitoring system, likely based on NetFlow, to assure
smooth operations.

This system likely will require a lot of customization to fit into your
IT system. Thus, you will require development, testing and training of
these customizations.

This use-case documents the use of an ELK-based flow-monitoring solution
to monitor VOIP traffic. Instead of affecting the production network, a
simulator in a lab can recreate your network without impacting operations.

Kibana is visualizing simulated VOIP traffic between many phones and
a PBX through CUCM as is common in banks, retailers, brokers or any
brick-and-mortar branch office where there are a lot of phones. Intensity
of traffic can be customized at will to test detection of usage patterns
and security risks.

MIMIC NetFlow Simulator is generating realistic VOIP flows from many
branch-office phones to some external "outside" phone numbers. By
tailoring the flows to your needs, you can verify that your monitoring
system is reacting as expected.

For example, you can have many phones with expected usage, and a small
set of high-traffic phones, and see if they are detected.