cloud - FatPipe Networks Blog

20 Jun

FatPipe’s Focused Threat Protection with Anti-Virus and Data Loss Prevention–Part II

In the previous blog, we discussed about effective Data Loss Prevention (DLP) from the angle of how data is protected and FatPipe’s crucial role in it. In this blog, we explore the types of sensitive data FatPipe’s antivirus/DLP solution is committed to safeguard.

Safeguard Data, Ensure Compliance, and Strengthen Trust

A strong DLP strategy also involves clearly defining and safeguarding your organization’s most valuable data assets. This includes identifying sensitive data, performing pattern matching, and analyzing signature types.

FatPipe intelligently leverages user behavior patterns, signature types, and false positive analysis to fine-tune both custom and predefined DLP configurations.
Custom policies foster operational efficiency, while predefined categories ensure swift deployment avoiding the pitfalls of regulatory failures realized only in hindsight.
To mitigate insider threats, FatPipe categorizes sensitive data including PII, credentials, financial records, healthcare data, and compliance-related content into granular security labels, ensuring protection against unauthorized access or leakage.
Compliance violations are detected using pattern- and signature-based rules.
The DLP engine continuously performs tuning of detection across security-critical content with minimal disruption, helping you stay ahead of the curve.
Custom policies give the leeway for organizations to tailor rules to their unique needs. Take for example the following: setting up a policy to detect internal project code names in outbound emails or flagging file transfers consisting of company’s confidential designs or scanning uploaded or shared config/text files for hardcoded credentials or API keys that may be exposed accidentally.
Predefined templates enable rapid deployment and regulatory alignment. For instance, choosing the healthcare category provides built-in detection rules for PHI, enabling swift deployment aligned with HIPAA-related data types.

By prioritizing DLP, companies protect critical data, simplify compliance, and strengthen brand credibility. FatPipe stays firm in its mission of placing both simplicity and security in equal weight, addressing the growing pains of organizations in maintaining data protection being one of its priorities.

09 Jun

FatPipe’s Focused Threat Protection with Anti-Virus and Data Loss Prevention

As organizations generate and manage digital information at an alarming rate, the demand for risk-aware and visibility-driven DLP systems has never been greater. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions essentially focus on preventing the unauthorized transmission or exposure of sensitive data beyond the realms of an organization, be it through email, web uploads, removable media, or insider misuse.

Balancing Security with Performance: FatPipe’s Smart Approach
While the need for DLP is undeniable, industries often face the challenge of balancing strong protection with operational efficiency. This is precisely where FatPipe makes the difference: delivering powerful, integrated security without compromising on performance. Just take the instance of blocking or scanning of potentially dangerous attachments which aids in preventing data leakage and malware infections. FatPipe can identify and flag suspicious content in files and emails and also scan for known malware, all without slowing business operations. Moreover, FatPipe’s antivirus/DLP offering maintains a reasonable balance between effective protection and operational efficiency. Here’s how FatPipe maintains the right balance:

Effective Protection Perspective: Given that today’s threat landscape is hostile, aggressiveness in certain FatPipe’s features only ease the gravity of the situation. Features like MIME type blocking, SMTP relay restrictions, and email file extension control prevent malware infiltration through deceptive attachments and rogue email servers. For example, if not for the restricting capacity that is leveraged while using certain file extensions in email attachments, your organization can easily become a prey of malware or data loss. Throttling risky file types, YouTube restrictions, and caching policies further harden the network against social engineering and bandwidth abuse.
Operational Efficiency Perspective: Also given the increased downtime, admin overhead, and need for quick access to trusted resources, FatPipe’s antivirus/DLP protection strategy allows customization or tuning to avoid false positives, is optimized for performance to not overwhelm system resources, is flexible enough to minimize user disruption, is policy-driven, and allows different enforcement levels for different departments or risk levels. For e.g., you can get the benefit of filtering inappropriate YouTube videos without blocking the entire platform, preserving access for business or educational purposes.

FatPipe’s antivirus and DLP solution ensures that an equilibrium is achieved: proactive in protection, yet adaptable in practice. But effective DLP isn’t just about how you protect, it’s also about what you protect. In the second part of this series, we will delve into how FatPipe identifies and protects different types of sensitive data, and how both predefined and custom DLP configurations can be harnessed to align protection with your organization’s unique data ambit and compliance needs.

What Next?

Our advanced Antivirus and DLP solution is a pivotal part of our Cybersecurity product. Keep visiting our resources for more updates on such features, or learn how you can be among the first to experience comprehensive security with endpoint and data protection by reaching us at support@fatpipeinc.com.

01 Jul

Enhancing Business Productivity with Application Aware Routing

Traditional network architectures, while efficient at routing packets, fall short in understanding the applications being transported and hence are unaware of business priorities. This hinders businesses from achieving optimal operations as there is no real-time application-based traffic routing. Modern networks, equipped with knowledge of the applications they carry, provide multiple benefits to businesses.

Advantage of Application Aware Routing for Modern Businesses

Application Path Control (Steering): When a Data Center link for a major e-commerce company’s Order Booking Application is impaired while a high-value order is being placed, the order will fail to go through. Application-aware routing, a key function, makes real-time routing decisions, redirecting the order booking to a better link ensuring successful Business closure. This involves abstracting, pooling, and assigning the transport infrastructure to applications based on software-defined policies. Application Aware Routing, a major function of Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN), steers and priorities mission-critical traffic ensuring that critical applications like voice and video sessions remain free from jitter, latency, or packet loss

Application Quality of Service: Imagine a customer at a bank’s priority desk trying to open an account during busy morning hours. The bank operator struggles with slow Account opening application due to bandwidth in busy hour being consumed by other employees opening large email attachments etc. An application-aware network, with appropriate policies, guarantees express bandwidth to the account opening application, preventing business loss. FatPipe SD-WAN has one of the best Application QoS modules for helping businesses increase profitability.

Application Portability: Users should seek solutions enabling easy application deployment across the cloud, data centers, remote premises or disaster recovery sites. The solution should offer centralized management to allow configuration and policy updates to multiple sites from a single interface. When applications move, policies should be easily updated and propagated across the network. FatPipe SD-WAN provides this functionality through user-friendly, zero-touch central orchestrator templates for specific policy directives of each Business.

Application Reports: In a remote factory, an employee using most of the bandwidth for personal Google downloads hinders business work. SD-WAN provides granular application reports at the user and link levels, allowing network administrators to diagnose the problem. FatPipe SD-WAN offers deep analytics, including CxO dashboards and detailed reports on top talkers, hosts, applications, and data usage by each application with user segregation enabling high quality Network Performance Management.

In summary, FatPipe SD-WAN application-aware agile and adaptive solutions for Network transformation ensure seamless and high-quality user experiences for enhancing business productivity and profitability.

31 Mar

Network Connectivity and COVID-19

Network Connectivity and COVID-19

Yes, the COVID -19 virus has absolutely affected the global economy, and not in a good way. It has also forced businesses, especially essential businesses, to be creative in the way they may not have expected even a few weeks ago.

Working from Home

Employees working from home is not necessarily new, but the number of employees working remotely has dramatically increased, thanks to the stay at home call from officials and business owners globally. As a result, the demand for secure and most importantly, reliable connectivity, has never been more acute. So how has the modern-day business adapted? What are the essential needs for remote workers, and how does the WAN administrator of today deal with these significant changes?

Facts: More than 25% of businesses have not updated their work from home security policies in the past 5 years. Driven by the need for secure remote access, companies are scrambling to implement solutions that are robust, secure, and of course reliable. This dramatic increase in the need for remote secure and reliable connectivity has placed extraordinary demands on the carriers as well as network administrators, some of whom are also working from home.

“The spread of coronavirus and social distancing mandates have put many IT pros in a precarious, but necessary, position of having to quickly transition to a largely remote workforce”. (Jackie Crankshaw, Lifeboat Channel Chat, 03/27/2020). “With more employees working from home, cybercriminals have more access points to exploit networks”

Hacking is always a present danger, but in today’s environment, the chances for breach of a network have significantly increased. Network administrators must be wary of the security issues they now face, and have to accommodate the changing business environment, especially as more workers are connecting from home offices.

Secure connections for remote workers

There are plenty of choices out there, and VPN connections are, for the most part, a logical way to go. But what good is the VPN if the connection itself is less than reliable, or worse still, down.

The key to ensuring remote workers can do what they are asked to do and help keep businesses up and running is to have the data traffic be secure, and of course, reliable.

For example, Video conferencing and VoIP calls are bandwidth hogs, and with more and more remote workers using these methodologies to connect, the demand for reliability and continuity of call is paramount.

So how can businesses of today, with all the challenges of social distancing ensure their “connectivity” is reliable and secure?

Simply deploying a VPN is not the answer. Without the ability to manage the links, or lines coming into the HQ data center, the VPN tunnels from all the remote workers will suffer from congestion and in some cases, the link may drop all together. This defeats the remote worker purpose.

The best possible way to ensure reliable connectivity is to enable software driven networking solutions to manage the connections.

FatPipe Networks have been developing and deploying software driven network solutions for well over 20 years, and have 13 seminal patents that enable customers to design, customize and manage how their data traffic is managed across the network. This includes remote worker connectivity.

Road Warrior solutions from FatPipe Networks

In fact, FatPipe has had a remote worker solution for many years, FatPipe Road Warrior solutions, which give customers the ability to load balance the traffic across multiple links, as well as failover in a sub-second should a link degrade or fail completely.

The difference with FatPipe solutions is the seamless nature of how it works. Just set it and watch how the traffic is automatically directed by the FatPipe software. FatPipe Road Warrior solutions allow customers to enable as many VPN tunnels (Fatpipe has tested to over 9,000 simultaneous connections) as necessary, and use any link type, including copper, fiber, wireless (3G;4G;5G; LTE) and satellite to load balance and failover when the demand requires.

In today’s disrupted business environment, knowing your connectivity is reliable, secure and manageable is critical. FatPipe Networks has been in the market for over 20 years and has recently received a Gartner Peer Review rating of 4.9 out of 5, taking the top spot in recommendations from customers as a best of breed SD-WAN solution.

If you have employees working from home, students learning “on line”, citizens trying to get information from their local city council, or just want to be able to manage data traffic coming into the network, then FatPipe must be a solution worth exploring.

Call FatPipe Networks today – 801-683-5656 ask for sales.

www.fatpipeinc.com

08 Nov

SD-WAN is now SD-WAN TM

SD-WAN is evolving to SD-WAN TM

Many SD-WAN solutions promise adopters a software/hardware solution that will ultimately solve their traffic routing issues and improve network performance. But research has shown that this is not the case. Over 60% of SD-WAN installs are retooled or worse, uninstalled, simply because they just do not meet the needs of today’s modern wide area network.

Let’s be honest, SD-WAN has got a rap, not necessarily “bad” but perhaps has been touted, incorrectly, as a panacea to solve a multitude of issues faced by today’s WAN administrators.

So why the confusion and lack of understanding? Perhaps it is marketing hype, where vendors in this market claim to have solutions that meet most customer’s needs, only to find far more is required than what is advertised. Perhaps customers are too quick to jump on the bandwagon, with administrators installing “SD-WAN” simply to appease management that they now have the latest and greatest, or to try something and see if and how it works.

SD-WAN (Software-Defined WAN) is cool, and can be a very effective, cost saving solution for almost ANY WAN of any size or configuration. After research with well over 100 SD-WAN users, both large and small, the clear differentiator in this discussion is undoubtedly, the “S”. The Software. It is well known that the hardware is no longer the focus for a successful, high speed WAN, it is how the software manages the traffic.

It is all about network traffic management

Perhaps SD-WAN should be changed to SD-WAN-TM – WAN Traffic Management, because at the end of the day, it really is about traffic management, knowing what the traffic type is, where it originates, the destination and of course, how it gets there.

Modern WANs are becoming more and more complex, especially with the adoption of cloud and hybrid cloud services and solutions, better bandwidth offerings, faster cell networks (5G is blisteringly quick) and of course, the need to access information and data from anywhere at any time, using a multitude of devices.

Users are driving the change. Instant access is imperative, demanded, and critical to the success of today’s fast paced on line business to consumer economy. Businesses are adapting to this change requiring more connectivity to aligned organizations, such as healthcare institutions connecting to insurance companies, financial institutions connecting to regulatory bodies, mortgage and insurance companies, and large on line retailers managing inventory, deliveries, and billing. We are becoming more and more connected, and with that brings the number 1 fear for any network administrator, the security of their data.

Security is undoubtedly the one issue keeping the WAN administrator awake at night. With the massive increase in network traffic on multiple and different link types, especially broadband, from multiple devices, the question must now be, how do you manage this traffic effectively, efficiently and most importantly, easily?

In order to have a reliable, secure and effective WAN, it is imperative that administrators take control of traffic across the network. Knowing how traffic is being routed and most importantly, being able to control it, is without question the most important factor affecting the modern WAN. Managing this traffic across multiple links using multiple formats is key. This is the promise of SD-WAN.

5 Necessities for a cost effective SD-WAN solution

To get the best “S” for your SD-WAN needs, there are a few easy steps any business should take. Here are 5 key questions you MUST ask your SD-WAN vendor:

Will your SD-WAN solution work with existing routers and network protocols?
Will your SD-WAN solution work with multiple links in one device, even if those links are different types and speeds, including copper, fiber, 3G,4G,5G LTE, broadband and satellite?
Will your Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) solution securely load balance and failover BOTH inbound and outbound traffic, even if this is VoIP or Video resulting in zero dropped calls?
Does your SD-WAN solution allow setting of thresholds for any traffic type, including application specific, protocol specific, line specific, or interface specific?
Will your SD-WAN solution be capable of managing traffic securely to and from any cloud or hybrid cloud application or service and can you do this all from a single screen view of the entire network?

If you answered yes to ALL of these questions, you have a very good SD-WAN solution, or even better, best of breed WAN traffic management.

Traffic management is already the most important factor affecting networks today. It will become even more important and critical as more and more devices connect. Multiple research predicts up to 50 Billion devices connected to the Internet by 2025.

To be sure you have the right “S” to manage your traffic, check to see how your network is designed, the links you have in place, the firewalls, routers, the current traffic management system, and ask yourself what is possible and what will be required to ensure reliability, security, redundancy, efficiency and, perhaps often overlooked, how simple will it be to configure and manage?

FatPipe Networks have been designing and developing best of breed SD-WAN solutions for over 17 years, are the holder of 12 seminal patents and are FIPS 140-2 certified. With the capability of managing up to 16 different links, with multiple speeds, sub second failover, stateful firewall, inbound redundancy and security, best WAN Optimization options, and scalable up to 40Gb, FatPipe can meet all of the customer SD-WAN requirements. FatPipe’s traffic management is second to none. Offering both capex and managed service solutions, FatPipe is unique in the market. Can you afford not to check out FatPipe’s WAN traffic management capabilities?

Call FatPipe today at 801-683-5656 x 1224. www.fatpipeinc.com