Forward Networks’ flagship product, Forward Enterprise, delivers a vendor-agnostic “digital twin” of the network, designed for both cloud and on-prem networks
Network migration is a critical undertaking for any organization looking to optimize their network performance, adopt new technologies, or achieve cost savings. However, this process poses numerous challenges that can lead to disruptions and unwarranted risks if not properly managed.
One of the primary challenges of network migration is verifying that the network behaves and provides the same service and connectivity after the migration as it did before. Traditional methods of manual verification are time-consuming, error-prone, and inefficient. NetOps teams test critical flows to ensure they were not disrupted, but without knowledge of every possible path a packet could traverse, it’s impossible to ensure that all connectivity remains unchanged. The tools provided by vendors to assist in migration cannot assess multi-vendor network behavior and identify deviations from expected norms.
This is where Forward Networks comes to the rescue. The network digital twin offers a holistic solution to prove network equivalency after network migration to ensure a seamless transition.
Forward Networks' digital twin is a game-changer when it comes to verifying network connectivity and security posture before and after a migration. To learn more about how the platform proves network equivalency, read the use case.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 17, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Forward Networks announced today that it has successfully achieved System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type II Compliance attestation conducted by an independent third party. The completion of the audit demonstrates Forward Networks' long-term commitment to providing its customers transparency, privacy, and data security. Forward Networks achieved SOC 2 Type I Compliance in July of last year.
SOC 2 is an auditing standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) to assess the effectiveness of an organization's controls over information security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. SOC 2 Type I compliance measures an organization's systems and controls and evaluates the design and implementation of these controls to ensure they are suitably designed to meet the relevant trust services criteria. SOC 2 Type II takes this a step further, evaluating the design and implementation of controls over a certain period.
Forward's SOC 2 Type II Compliance audit was conducted over 9 months, with no additional recommendations. With SOC 2 Type II Compliance, Forward Networks provides customers with proof of security, confidentiality, and availability across identity and action control, data classification, and backups.
"This is yet another milestone in Forward Networks' security journey, which is focused on protecting customer data and privacy and ensuring trust and transparency," said Matt Honea, Head of Security and Compliance at Forward Networks. "We're working to build a robust, wide-reaching compliance program that meets the needs of our customers across every vertical market. Forward Networks is designed to meet any deployment model, including for on-prem, hybrid, and cloud environments."
Recently, a critical vulnerability, CVE-2024-3400, was discovered in the Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS software, posing a substantial risk to affected systems. In this blog post, we will discuss the nature of this vulnerability and how Forward Networks can assist organizations in swiftly identifying and addressing their risk exposure.
Understanding CVE-2024-3400:
CVE-2024-3400 is classified as a command injection vulnerability and specifically affects the GlobalProtect feature of Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS software. This vulnerability, present in certain PAN-OS versions and specific feature configurations, enables an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the firewall.
To learn more about the Vulnerability Assessment capabilities in Forward Enterprise, please read the use case or view the demo.
Rodney Alto served 35 years as a senior executive in technology at the Central Intelligence Agency. He’s now a senior advisor for federal strategy and security at Forward Networks.
What is one of largest challenges today in IT? It’s not AI, quantum computing, or even cyber—it’s technical debt. If technical debt is something you have never heard of, you’re not alone, but I encourage you to engage your CIO, CISO, and IT Managers on this topic; it’s one of those topics that causes technologists to take pause, gasp for air, and then share the dark secrets of technical debt at your company, Agency, or Department.
But what is technical debt? If technical debt is new to you, the easiest way to articulate technical debt is it’s all the hardware and software within your organization that is currently at End-of-Life (EoL) or End-of-Support (EoS) and what infrastructure will become EoL or EoS in the next 12-months. The technical debt problem is both a historical and a forward-looking challenge, and the technical debt challenge is never completely solved, as equipment goes EoS/EoL almost every day. For this reason, technical debt needs to be continuously managed.
Technical debt is also a cumulative challenge—how many times has your organization decided to push infrastructure investments to the right? Unfortunately, when technical debt is not being addressed systematically every year, it grows exponentially and can get out of control very quickly, negatively impacting operational readiness, infrastructure resiliency, and cyber readiness.
Technical debt is a universal and pervasive challenge within IT; it affects Public/Private sectors equally and is one of the greatest self-induced cyber risks in the enterprise. Legacy hardware and unpatched software is the easy button every cyber bad actor is looking for; an unpatched or EoL router, switch, or firewall with well documented vulnerabilities provides an easy path to compromising your network. By addressing technical debt systematically, you can exponentially reduce your cyber vulnerabilities, improve operational readiness, and decrease unplanned infrastructure outages.
The dark truth about technical debt is that most IT and cyber managers do not know how much technical debt their organizations have. But wait, you say, we have a CMDB—and the answer would be “yes”, but if you press the IT and Cyber teams, you will find the CMDB’s are not accurate, as many do not collect against all vendor equipment, do not contain information from mission/business networks, and often do not collect information on products like firewalls.
There is a solution—if you have not heard of Forward Networks, I would encourage you to reach out to Forward Networks for a discussion on technical debt. The Forward Networks platform is the industry leader in collecting authoritative vendor agnostic data on all aspects of your network enterprise and any unique mission/business systems networks. The FN platform passively collects this data, with no agents required, normalizes the data across approximately 30 network vendors, and allows you to easily query the Forward Networks platform to develop authoritative and timely reports on the technical debt within your enterprise or mission/business environments. Forward Networks is also an API first platform; we integrate with products like ServiceNow to better populate your organization's enterprise CMDB.
Forward Networks is the industry leader in providing timely, accurate, and continuous monitoring of your network enterprise. Forward Networks is happy to work with your company, Agency, or Department to provide you the data insights each enterprise manager needs to make data driven and timely decisions based on authoritative data that is easily available.
Forward Networks won the prestigious Gold designation for Cloud Computing Security at the 2024 Globee Awards for Cybersecurity. This recognizes Forward Networks' commitment to transforming how SecOps, CloudOps, and NetOps teams operate by creating a single source of truth for engineers with actionable insights that empower them to regain control over their networks.
Winning this award is an incredible achievement for Forward Networks, as security is the top concern for every enterprise. The data collected and analyzed by our network digital twin gives NetOps, SecOps, and CloudOps teams unparalleled visibility into their network's security landscape. Engineers no longer have to manually hunt for information, compliance is automatically checked with each collection and engineers are immediately alerted if a verification check does not pass, Common Vulnerabilities within the network are published in an easy to read (and export) report that offers a prioritized remediation plan, the reachability of a compromised host is available in a mouse click, and teams have access to an always current security posture matrix that shows connectivity between zones at a glance. Having this information at engineers’ fingertips is a game changer, helping address issues before there even is an issue and drastically reducing the time it takes to respond to an breach. Our security capabilities cover the entire hybrid, multi-cloud network.
Additionally, Security Today honored Forward Networks with the 2024 GOVIE award for Compliance Acceleration with government agencies who are highly regulated due to the sensitive nature of their work. Specifically, the award honored Forward Networks for its work in helping federal networks prepare for CCRI (Cyber Command Readiness Inspections) and STIG Compliance.
Today's network environments are too complex to track by purely manual efforts. With digital twin technology, IT teams can build a virtual model of the production network and use it to validate configurations, simulate changes, and streamline management.
The use of digital twins – digital representations of physical objects or systems – is on the rise. Enterprises can use digital twins to replicate their IT environments, including infrastructure, network equipment, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and then run simulations to test the impact of changes and to optimize performance. They can be used to validate the current state of a network, for example, and test configuration changes, firmware updates, or adjustments to security policies.
In the fast-paced world of cybersecurity, Security Operations (SecOps) teams face an ever-evolving landscape of threats and challenges. As a professional in the NetOps, SecOps, or CloudOps field, you understand the critical importance of staying ahead of cyber adversaries and safeguarding your network infrastructure. That's where Forward Networks steps in, offering innovative solutions that revolutionize SecOps by supercharging your network insights and capabilities.
Our Co-Founder, Nikhil Handigol offers "5 Ways to Supercharge SecOps with Network Insights," where he unveils how SecOps engineers can elevate their SecOps game using digital twin technology. Let's explore five key takeaways that can transform the way you approach security operations:
1. Unlocking Vulnerability Management: Navigating the vast sea of vulnerabilities across servers and applications can be daunting. With a true network digital twin, you can instantly see which vulnerabilities are present in your network ranked by severity, making it easy to prioritize remediation and have mathematical confidence the network is compliant.
2. Attack Surface Management: Understanding your network's attack surface is crucial in fortifying your defenses against cyber threats. With Forward Networks' advanced capabilities, proactively identify areas where your network is out of compliance and analyze your exposure. By visualizing attack vectors and vulnerable hosts, you can proactively defend your network infrastructure.
3. Harnessing the Power of Software: Modern networks demand sophisticated solutions that go beyond use-specific tools. By leveraging network digital twin technology, you can validate your network's security posture with precision. Say goodbye to manual validation processes and embrace the efficiency of AI-driven insights.
4. Enhancing Network Visibility: In the realm of SecOps, visibility is key. Forward Networks' digital twin empowers security engineers with comprehensive insights into network connectivity and configurations. Real-time visibility into your network's traffic flow and behavior enables proactive threat detection and rapid incident response.
5. Transforming Security Operations with Network Insights: Unleash the full potential of your Security Operations Center (SoC) by integrating network insights into your security strategy. With Forward Networks' cutting-edge solutions, bridge the gap between network operations and security, fostering collaboration and efficiency across teams.
Are you eager to learn more? Nikhil goes into greater detail and demonstrates how the network insights delivered by true digital twin technology can supercharge SecOps teams. View the session on demand.
Join the revolution in SecOps with Forward Networks and embrace a future where network security knows no bounds. Stay tuned for more insights, advancements, and partnerships that shape the future of cybersecurity.
In the world of networking, misconfigurations and inconsistencies can lead to significant issues for businesses, especially those in highly regulated industries such as financial services. One Fortune 500 financial services company experienced a nightmare scenario with their MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) settings, resulting in application and performance problems. Fortunately, the company found a solution in Forward Networks' digital twin. This blog post will delve into the MTU issues faced by the company and how Forward Networks helped them overcome these challenges.
The MTU Nightmare:
The financial industry is known for its tight control over deployments and configurations. However, this also means that any misconfiguration or inconsistency can have severe consequences. The financial services company had been facing application issues and performance problems that had been occurring randomly, making it difficult to identify the root cause. Eventually, it was discovered that there was a misconfiguration in the MTU settings of a cross link between core devices. While jumbo frames were enabled north and south, this cross link was set to a lower MTU size of 1500. The issues became more apparent when the primary path failed, and traffic started traversing this misconfigured link. The network devices had to fragment the traffic, resulting in processing delays.
Before incorporating Forward Networks' digital twin technology, the company had programmers writing custom scripts to identify misconfigurations. These scripts were scattered across personal drives, making it challenging to consolidate and analyze the vast amounts of data they generated. The team became overwhelmed with Excel files containing close to a million lines, making the investigation process nearly impossible.
Recognizing the need for a more efficient and centralized approach to network analysis, the company turned to Forward Networks. The company saw promising results with Forward Networks' digital twin solution, which offered out-of-the-box capabilities to address their MTU issues. Forward Networks provided a pre-built script specifically designed to identify MTU misconfigurations, convincing the company of the platform's suitability for their needs.
Although the pre-written script provided by Forward Networks yielded results, the company still needed to narrow down the information it wanted to see. Despite not being a programmer, one of the company's network engineers was able to customize the script using educational resources provided by Forward Networks and the company’s user community. The engineer successfully created a tailored solution that only displayed infrastructure MTU information, filtering out unnecessary data.
By leveraging the capabilities of Forward Networks' network assurance and intent-based networking platform, this company saved a significant amount of time by automating the identification of MTU issues. Forward Networks enabled them to replace manual, fragmented scripts with a centralized solution, empowering their engineers to analyze network data more efficiently. In turn, they have minimized downtime and ensured that their network infrastructure is robust and reliable.
As usual, the delegates put us through our paces with insightful and sometimes challenging questions, which is the reason we enjoy this event so much: it’s engineers talking to engineers (marketing people like me are verboten), and they don’t hold back. We’re delighted that three of the delegates have published articles detailing their takeaways from our presentations.
"Forward Networks - The tale of an aptly named company" by Ryan Lambert provides an in-depth exploration of Forward Networks' approach to network digital twins. Lambert delves into the practical applications of network digital twins, highlighting their ability to model network behaviors and streamline network management processes. From compliance verification to outage troubleshooting, he believes that network digital twins promise to revolutionize how organizations manage their networks.
John Herbert's article, "'AI Assist' is better than 'AI Do It For Me'," offers a candid reflection on the role of artificial intelligence in network management. Herbert emphasizes the importance of maintaining human oversight and control in the face of AI-driven solutions. He likes Forward Networks' AI Assist feature for its user-centric approach, which empowers users to evaluate and modify AI-generated queries, ensuring accuracy and reliability in network management tasks.
In "Unveiling the power of Digital Twins," Greg Grimes explores the transformative potential of network digital twins in network management. Greg outlines Forward Networks' innovative approach to creating its network digital twin, which eliminates the computational burden associated with traditional virtual appliances. With practical applications ranging from compliance verification to route update predictions, Forward’s network digital twin modernizes network management processes.
If you get a chance, please take a look at the full-length versions of the articles; they’re written by engineers, not professional journalists or analysts. It’s a window into how “hands-on-keyboard” professionals feel about our capabilities.
If we were lucky enough to meet with you at Cisco Live EMEA – thank you for trusting us with your time! Thanks to great attendance and interest in our new Generative AI feature, we met more people than ever and had more 1:1 technical sessions than ever before. Did we miss you?
Not to worry, one of our sessions was recorded and is now available on demand.
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Discover the transformative power of Generative AI in unlocking network insights with co-founder, Nikhil Handigol. In this session, Nikhil demonstrated how Forward Networks seamlessly incorporates generative AI into its network digital twin, revolutionizing the accessibility of crucial information for NetOps, SecOps, and CloudOps engineers.
Why is network data your most valuable asset to ensure compliance? Chiara Regale, SVP of Product and UX for Forward Networks, discusses our integrations with Tenable and Rapid7 and how our integrations deliver complete attack surface visibility that empowers SecOps teams to proactively identify impacted hosts with critical vulnerabilities accessible from the Internet or other critical exposure points within seconds. Due to technical difficulties, this session was not recorded. Please view, instead, this in-depth BrightTALK session.
Are you headed to Cisco Live U.S.? Then carve out some time to come talk to us. We’ll have our top technical experts and co-founders on hand to provide solutions to your toughest problems! If that’s not enough to entice you, we’ll have yummy treats, eye-popping drawings, and super-cool in-booth giveaways. Only a clown would miss it!
