Cyber security consistently stays at the top of the news as cyber criminals and even organized crime find new methods to compromise corporate networks. Viruses, worms, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and other threats become ever-more sophisticated. A lapse in security can result in service degradation, downtime, brand damage and legal liability. Those who create and deploy network security devices face greater challenges to ensure that the security infrastructure will protect the network from malicious attacks.

Do you know the answers to these questions for your device or network?

• Will my deep-packet inspection (DPI), intrusion detection system (IDS), and intrusion protection system (IPS) defend the network against new threats as soon as they emerge?
• Does my security infrastructure provide acceptable performance for valid user traffic during an attack?
• Do my best-of-breed devices work well together—are the policies synergistic or conflicting?
• Can my network handle virus detection and spam filtering even under heavy loads?
• Can my firewalls enforce policies and resist hackers with traditional and application-level inspections?
• Can my devices resist DDoS attacks?
• How can I measure the tunnel capacity and performance of my IP Sec VPN?
• Can my devices handle extreme loads?
• Does my system fail open, letting all traffic through unchecked, or closed, where no traffic gets through?

To ensure that your security infrastructure is solid, it must be tested in an environment that reproduces the complexity and scale of the production network in bandwidth, traffic type and number of transactions, users, sessions, ports, tunnels and VLANs. If your test system can’t deliver this level of realism, you can’t have the assurance that the system will perform in a real network.