Netscout is taking aim at helping enterprises improve network visibility with the company's Visibility Without Borders (VWB) platform announced this week.

VWB isn't an entirely new technology; rather, what it represents is an integration of multiple Netscout capabilities into a unified platform to help improve visibility. The goal is to provide organizations with insights into network availability, performance and security using a common data framework.

“This platform allows enterprises to enhance collaboration between their ITOps, NetOps and SecOps teams by using the same shared dataset and instrumentation foundation,” Jason Chaffee, sr. director, product marketing at Netscout, told SDxCentral.

Netscout has long had multiple tools in its software portfolio to help enterprises get network telemetry from different types of deployments, including on-premises, cloud and multicloud environments for various use cases.

Chaffee explained that the instrumentation provides deep packet inspection (DPI) at scale to generate both increased network performance and security intelligence. He added that underlying this approach is Netscout's patented Smart Data technology, which generates metadata using the company's Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) capability. With ASI, Chaffee said, actionable metadata from DPI network traffic flows can be produced.

“It [ASI] allows for consistent, comprehensive and real-time metadata from anywhere, any size or any number of locations,” Chaffee said. “We call this Smart Data, and it underlies the key performance indicators and intelligence that drive all of our network and security workflows.”

What the new VWB platform does is combine Netscout's different visibility tools together in a new way to better use the shared Smart Data source and instrumentation sets.

Chaffee said VWB adds integration between multiple Netscout services, including nGenius Enterprise Performance Management, Omnis Cyber Intelligence and Arbor DDoS Protection solutions. The overall goal is to allow users to drill back and forth for cross-related issues contextually.

For instance, Chaffee said that a network performance issue may actually be caused by a security issue, and NetOps can collaboratively work with SecOps to find the root cause and solve the problem more quickly. The same could be true in the other direction as well.

“Rather than pointing fingers at each other or using disparate tool sets, these groups can detect and resolve problems faster,” he said.

There are a number of common challenges that enterprises often need to overcome to get full visibility.

According to Chaffee, one of the biggest challenges large organizations face is the segregation of NetOps and SecOps teams, which tend to have different goals, different budgets and siloed approaches to solving problems quickly. Additionally, he noted that today’s digital transformation efforts have created more complexity and “blind spots” as IT infrastructure has become more distributed.

One possible solution for the challenge of siloed teams and data is by applying a platform approach to visibility that improves the observability of performance and security issues across any cloud, any network, any service and any application.

That's the goal for the VWB platform, which Chaffee said will help promote active collaboration among IT teams as they can share a common dataset and instrumentation, and streamline troubleshooting and operations efforts together.

“Our virtual appliance options allow customers to instrument their co-location, hybrid cloud, multicloud environments to regain the same level of visibility they are used to within traditional data centers,” Chaffee said. “Again, this same data can be used for both performance and security use cases.”