With the surge in network traffic and the proliferation of BYOD devices, along with the rise in cyber threats, enterprises and IT organizations worldwide are deploying more security, monitoring and accelerations tools at additional locations in their network, reports Network World (News - Alert).

This report was written by Brian Musthaler, a principal consultant with Essential Solutions Corp. According to Musthaler, “There is a greater need for visibility, as well as intelligence, of the network.”

For instance, if the security tools are not performing to the best of their abilities, the user must have some way of determining their performance so that the network is fully protected.  Concurrently, enterprises and businesses are also ramping up network speed, going from 10G to 40G and above, while the traffic is a mixture of  voice, video and data. And, all this data must be well understood and analyzed by monitoring tools such as a network packet broker.

In essence, IT managers are now seeking more reliable technologies that will insure that their network monitoring and security tools are performing up to the mark, while keeping up with rapid growth in traffic, speed and network complexity.

Because many of today's tools rely purely on switched port analyzer (SPAN) ports, traditional aggregators and/or Netflow, they do not have access to the real physical and link layer of the network. While they are good at providing a level of data aggregation, they ignore the critical element of link layer visibility, adds Musthaler.

In reality, the modern tools receiving the aggregated data cannot determine the details about a specific packet or threat. For example, he explains, it cannot determine the exact port or network segment or the specific time it was captured. Consequently, this has led to unexpected complexities around security incident analysis and response, resulting in challenges in gaining situational awareness when advanced threats or network issues are found.

According to the Network World report, the industry needs a more intelligent network security and monitoring approach, which will provide granular visibility down to the link layer. The answer lies in an emerging solution called network packet brokers (NPBs), offered by companies such as VSS Monitoring and others.

As per the report, NPBs represent a new approach to increased visibility. In addition, the solution optimizes and scales the connectivity between network switching and the entire network of performance and security analytics, inline security and WAN acceleration tools.

In short, NPBs broker network traffic from multiple SPAN ports, and manipulate the traffic to allow more efficient use of network tools and monitoring devices on the network.

NPB solutions provider VSS Monitoring (News - Alert) believes that “the right set of NPBs will help enterprises perform on-demand traffic capture and maintain full link layer network visibility, which is critical in monitoring large network infrastructures for rapid incident response.”

Recently, the company’s vBroker Series of NPBs won the 2012 INTERNET TELEPHONY Product of the Year Award.

“It is with pleasure that we recognize VSS Monitoring with a Product of the Year Award,” said Rich Tehrani (News - Alert), CEO, TMC. “The editors of INTERNET TELEPHONY have verified that the vBroker Series displays quality and innovation while providing solutions to real business communications challenges.”

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO Miami 2013, Jan 29- Feb. 1 in Miami, Florida.  Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.