Mobile data usage is on the rise, to put it mildly.

Data traffic has increased 104 percent the past year, according to CTIA (News - Alert) and reported by TMCnet, and the wireless industry association reports that the mobile networks handled 1.16 trillion megabytes (.116 exabytes) of data between July 2011 and June 2012 alone. Mobile data usage is set to expand to 10.8 exabytes per month by 2016, according to Cisco, which illustrates the steep rise in demand.

Mobile networks are coping with this demand as best they can. The rollout of LTE (News - Alert) services helps, but to maximize their network investment many are employing service assurance tools so they can make sure quality of service, IP voice and other applications running over their networks are given the reliability they require.

In turn, carriers are expected to spend $5 billion on analyzers and service assurance probes in the next two years to help manage the load.

VSS Monitoring, whose solutions are used by three of the four largest U.S. service providers, has responded to the challenge of service assurance by decoupling its network packet broker (NPB) tools from the underlying network infrastructure. Its distributed vMesh architecture offers a middle layer between the tools and the network that can aggregate and correlate data, remove data not needed by select tools, and perform load balancing among probes so wireless operators can continue to leverage their investments in one gigabit service assurance tools.

The company also helps carriers deploy, scale and optimize their security solutions.

One of the challenges carriers currently face is that POC cycles can be lengthy, risky, and consume too many network resources, delaying protection against emerging threats. Luckily, VSS Monitoring (News - Alert) helps carriers deploy inline tools in controlled phases, extend current investment in 1G tools, and makes compliance with regulations easier.

Networks are growing at a fast clip, and the growth rate can oversubscribe tools, mismatch between 1G and 10G speeds and increase the level or traffic saturation. Yet, carriers must aggregate multiple compartmentalized network segments while retaining integrity of individual security zones and maintaining compliance.

In terms of scale, VSS Monitoring supports mixed 10G and 1G environments in order to protect multiple security zones simultaneously. This then enables firms to gain complete, multi-segment network visibility, achieve high availability of security tools, and easily scale security solutions beyond 80Gbps for inline tools and virtually limitless for passive tools.

Emerging cyber threats require additional layers of defense, so carriers need to be able to confidently add new layers of security with minimal change or risk to the production environment.

VSS Monitoring helps by maximizing efficiency of security tools, maintaining inline tools without service impact, and adding best-of-breed security layers with confidence.

The combined benefits offered by network packet broker provider VSS Monitoring, both in terms of security and service assurance, show why the business continues to be selected by major corporations looking to protect themselves at all times.