There are only two options for managing a global multi-cloud network: either by using a combination of inference, hope, and intuition or with mathematical certainty. When conducting 5 million financial transactions daily, it’s essential to operate with certainty, regardless of your network’s size or geographical distribution. Auditors don’t accept inferences; they demand certainty when determining compliance, and a poor audit can be disastrous for the business.
We recently sat down with the director of IT for a global payment processing company, and his opening remarks were, “They say a picture is worth a thousand words; an accurate network map is worth a million words because things are so complex in the cloud.” This IT leader turned to Forward Networks to help make sense of the company network to ensure it was secure and behaving as intended.
Forward Networks creates a digital twin of the network by safely collecting configuration and state data from all devices and using publicly available APIs to reconstruct cloud presence. The platform then uses header space analysis to determine every path a packet could take, which delivers the most accurate representation of network behavior. The same information is used to identify security vulnerabilities and compute the blast radius of a compromised host.
According to the executive we spoke with, “We now have an easy way to understand the day-to-day operations of the network and how routes are being propagated with accurate insight into connectivity. We know if the infrastructure is properly connected and if the infrastructure zones are connected as intended.”
This degree of certainty has enabled them to automate application provisioning. When done manually, the process took weeks and had a significant backlog. It’s now possible to instantly verify the security of a new app and deploy it. This is helping them recognize revenue faster.
Read the case study to learn more about this company and the benefits they realized from implementing Forward Networks.
