Most organizations have several cloud accounts that span multiple cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure — and that’s not counting the hundreds or even thousands of cloud apps they have in use or in development across the organization.
While the cloud delivers on the promise of agility, it also creates challenges in understanding traffic behavior from the point of access, within and between clouds. IT shops need a detailed source of truth that’s always up to date to manage their enterprise computing estate and ensure policy compliance.
Cloud providers offer visibility and monitoring tools that are specific to their platform. These tools are powerful stand-alone applications, but they’re not designed to work together and can’t provide a comprehensive view of your estate. Also, each cloud provider has its own nomenclature and platform visualization, making it difficult for any one person to understand all the tools. This elongates the time it takes to prove network innocence in the event of an incident and makes it nearly impossible to ensure carefully crafted networking policies are properly extended to the cloud.
At this point, you may be thinking, “Tell me something I don’t know.” Here it is: with the Forward Enterprise platform from Forward Networks, you can now visualize and monitor your entire estate in an always up-to-date, vendor-agnostic model where data is presented in an intuitive, actionable format — in a single pane of glass.
Finally, Real Visibility to Help Maximize Your Cloud Investments
The Forward Enterprise platform provides search, verify, and visualization capabilities for on-premises environments and multi-cloud estates that include platforms such as AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure. Your IT teams gain a single source of truth in a single console that lets them view the entire environment from a global level down to a specific device or networking object.
This turns the once incredibly difficult tasks of validating multi-cloud connectivity, verifying security policies, and analyzing hop-by-hop traffic into an automated and accurate effort that takes seconds — not days or weeks. And, with a single click, your IT teams can explore specific objects — from virtual firewalls to transit gateways to cloud instances — to understand exactly how everything in your organization’s cloud environments relates to and interacts with each other.
Forward Enterprise provides a visualization of your organization’s entire cloud estate alongside your on-premises environment in a single normalized view. We collect config and state data from all your on-premises devices, such as routers, switches, load balancers, and firewalls. And we use publicly available APIs to gather similar read-only information for your various cloud accounts, including those with major providers, to create a network digital twin.
Forward Enterprise needs only a basic set of connectivity APIs to access the data required to show all possible traffic paths into your cloud environments. All permissions we use to collect data are read-only.
A Single Source of Truth for Your On-Premises, Hybrid, and Multi-Cloud Estate
Forward Networks’ mathematical model creates a complete and always current digital twin of your physical, virtual, and multi-cloud network estate, including config and state information for all network elements and your hybrid or multi-cloud environment. The digital twin provides a comprehensive view of all network behavior, with visibility into every possible path a packet can take. It brings mathematical certainty to network security validations by enabling security operations teams to:
VISUALIZE network layer 2 – 4 topology and all possible traffic paths within a single pane of glass including on-premises, Cloud (AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure), and virtualized environments. Then, drill down to specific devices and traffic flows, including configuration and state data. View the global network in a single view or drill down to a single device.
SEARCH the entire estate as simply as a database. Our browser-like search feature performs complete end-to-end path analyses across the network for both on-premises and cloud infrastructure. This also enables you to locate devices and access detailed information on their location, configuration, and state in milliseconds.
VERIFY that the security policies are extended to the cloud using purpose-built (custom) intent checks. Continuously audit the network and receive actionable alerts for non-compliance with your security policies. Know that applications are compliant before provisioning them.
COMPARE network changes over time to understand their impact on the network and prevent incidents from reoccurring. The network collector frequently scans the network, taking and saving network configurations, topology, and device state snapshots. These “snapshots” become a searchable historical record of network behavior and compliance at any point in time. And the behavior diffs feature makes it easy to quickly find and compare snapshots to identify changes that may violate your security policy.
Explore All Aspects of Your Compute Environment With Forward Enterprise
See for yourself how the Forward Enterprise platform can help your network and security teams to monitor and verify all your clouds through a single pane of glass and explore any object in your cloud environment to ensure everything is working exactly as it should be. To see this feature and the power of a network digital twin in action,
please request a demo.
