Today's enterprise IT teams are well acquainted with the pressures of ensuring network security, while also managing the time it takes to do so. The recent experience of one multinational technology company perfectly illustrates how Networks Query Engine (NQE) can be used to quickly and effectively bolster network security.
As with most companies, this company's IT team was asked on a regular basis to locate IP addresses in the network. While some of these queries are more general in nature, others stem directly from concerns over network security.
For instance, IT might learn that a particular host isn't supposed to be on the network. Or someone might raise a red flag after seeing a tablet logged into another machine. Regardless of the cause, however, it's imperative that IT quickly locate and isolate potentially dangerous IP addresses.
Traditionally, the process of doing so has taken anywhere from a few minutes up to as long as 20 minutes. And if there's anything that enterprise IT teams agree upon, it's the need to reduce time-intensive projects.
According to one recent study, 72 percent of technology professionals say the shift to support remote work – whether fully remote or hybrid – has created additional work for IT departments, as they struggle to support employees in multiple locations. Furthermore, a quarter of the IT workforce is either looking for a new role, changing jobs or switching careers in 2022.
Not surprisingly, 97 percent of IT professionals cite feeling burned out as the primary driver for leaving the field and/or finding a new company. That burnout is driven by increasing demands from employers and other stakeholders – and many of those demands stem from unplanned interruptions like the need to locate an IP address.
In this particular case, the enterprise IT team found that by utilizing NQE to locate an IP address, they were also able to find the associated advertised subnet. Likewise, they quickly found the upstream layer 3 distribution switch and its associated media access control (MAC) address, enabling them to pull the associated virtual LAN and access the specific switch that's being used by a specific device.
Moreover, using NQE to locate the IP address reduced the amount of time needed to do so to just a matter of seconds vs hours or days of manual work. This frees the IT team to work on more strategic projects and eliminates a mind-numbing task that contributes to burnout.
Learn more about how you can use NQE to solve common IT tasks by scheduling a demo today. Be sure to read our other blogs in this series about how Forward Networks is impacting enterprise networks around the world, including The Show Must Go On: NQE Helps Entertainment Venue Avoid 'Spectacular Customer Service Fail.'