From legacy to automation: Spirent’s impact on network validation – ETCIO

Rajesh Pathak, Country Managing Director - India & SAARC, Spirent Communications Spirent Communications boasts a storied legacy as a provider of cutting-edge solutions in the realm of network testing, validation, and assurance. Over the years, the company has established a reputation for excellence and reliability, serving as a trusted partner for organizations in various segments of the network communication market.

Rajesh Pathak, Spirent Communications' Country Managing Director for India & SAARC, talks about Spirent's network testing legacy, leadership, innovation, automation, and adaptability. What is Spirent's focus in the market and what innovative solution offerings does it have for the enterprise segment? Our mission at Spirent is to help customers innovate faster and reduce costs. Enterprise networks are undergoing an unprecedented transformation, and our automated test and assurance solutions are designed to help ensure that new technology becomes an engine for growth and efficiency. We help enterprises ensure that cloud migrations and SD-WAN, Wi-Fi and Ethernet networks and private mobile networks perform as expected, and are secure. Testing and assurance help ensure that technology deployments are successfully delivered with the performance and security that the organization and its end-users expect.

Evaluate performance at turn-up before end-user starts using the network

Continuously check critical services and links, such as an IoT sensor or emergency communications, regardless of traffic levels

Proactively identify minor issues on the network and service before they become major

Troubleshoot complex issues in any part of the network because its virtualized and inserts small amounts of traffic, so its not a heavy lift How does Spirent assist in ensuring cloud-based networks and services as operators, network vendors, government entities, and large enterprises prepare for next-gen network deployments? We have focused on evolving our test and assurance solutions to address the added complexity of the new distributed, disaggregated network infrastructures and security architectures, and validating these constantly changing networks and polices. This includes cloud-native performance testing that provides realistic and scalable application traffic emulation in cloud-native environments; high-performance and scalable cloud and security testing; multi-cloud validation with a single pane of glass testing across distributed hybrid networks; zero-trust validation; and cloud resiliency testing to determine built-in resiliency and self-healing capabilities of cloud-native networks.

Spirents enterprise solutions enable organizations to test networks and security from pre-deployment through to live operation for cloud, SD-WAN, Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6, and 5G networks. Our test, assurance and automation solutions with pre-built test suites on various technologies provide a continuous approach to testing, helping enterprise teams to work together with continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) and DevOps. This provides a consistent approach to testing across all stages of the network lifecycle, which is a key enabler of CI/CD and DevOps transformations. Post deployment, this approach enables teams to continuously test service level agreements (SLAs) to prove compliance and avoid potential penalties; quickly isolate problems to reduce resolution time and costs; proactively assess security to detect vulnerabilities and take action; and understand and optimize the true user experience. How can Spirent enhance the value of validating new infrastructure with greater efficiency? Spirent has a long heritage in providing test and measurement solutions for virtually all segments of the network communication market. We are leading the charge in many of the next major advancements in networking, ranging from high-speed Ethernet 800G, 5G, cloud-native and cybersecurity. The way vendors use testing, validation and assurance is changing in fundamental ways because traditional manual testing is simply no longer viable. Before releasing products and updates into the live network, vendors want to emulate the real-world environments in which products will operate by creating highly accurate digital twins of the real world to test products and performance across the entire system to ensure that the user experience is as anticipated. For this reason, test and assurance must be automated and continuous because development cycles are so fast, and the live network is constantly changing. What is the key USP that your Security Suite offers to enterprise customers? Cybersecurity is such an important element for all customers, and Spirent provides enterprise test solutions to validate the performance, scalability, and security effectiveness of diverse networks, as well as security solutions like next-gen firewalls, intrusion prevention and detection systems, application delivery controllers, SD-WAN, SASE and ZTNA architectures.

Our flagship cybersecurity test solution is CyberFlood delivers a unified workflow, portable methodologies, and ease of deployment across all an enterprises domains, whether they be on-premise, private cloud, public cloud and cloud-native/container. Another of CyberFloods proven advantages is that it is used throughout the network lifecycle, from design, through deployment, and on-going assurance.

Added to this, Spirent also offers a variety of managed test services delivered by our certified, seasoned security professionals. They act as an extension of the customers own in-house security team, proactively identifying vulnerabilities and mitigating risks. By augmenting their own security teams with our experts in testing and security, an enterprise can optimize staffing, supplement the organizations internal expertise, and facilitate compliance with independent third-party testing and reporting.

The hybrid networks especially require enhanced collaboration with vendors and heightened vigilance against cyberattacks. What is Spirents security approach to this? Today's enterprise networks become more vulnerable for increased and modern security threats which makes the security team more focused on keeping their network sustain these threats. To address this threat sustainability, the Security team must always monitor the risks including the internal & external security threats, comply to regulatory requirements, threat modelling, security patches, security policies, risk management, etc. This involves constant change in the network/ devices which requires frequent and continuous validation on pre-production environment by emulating the real-world traffic, threats & network conditions before rolling out to the production network. Spirent has continuous & automated test validation solution which can trigger, perform & publish the sandbox validations in an automated environment including the production network roll-out process as well. This proven solution reduces the time-to-test drastically and ensures the patch/ policy change doesnt affect the production network with reduced overheads & resources.

NOTE: This article is a part of ETCIO Brand Connect Initiative.

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From legacy to automation: Spirent's impact on network validation - ETCIO