Gigamon launches Hawk

 IT complexity, which grew exponentially following the recent acceleration of digital transformation, has led to a foundational gap in visibility across the underlying hybrid infrastructure. The gap exists because network tools lack visibility into cloud traffic, and cloud tools lack critical network visibility because they rely solely on application-level telemetry. Additionally, traditional visibility solutions cannot be automated to elastically scale across a dynamic hybrid infrastructure. This cloud visibility gap has made it extremely challenging for IT teams to effectively manage digital infrastructure, leading to a poor customer experience, blind spots in security and compliance and challenges in cloud adoption.

To close this critical cloud visibility gap, Gigamon is launching Hawk, the industry’s first elastic visibility and analytics fabric for all data-in-motion across any cloud network. Hawk is the only visibility solution that delivers:

• Elastic visibility for any cloud. Hawk’s visibility-as-code can be embedded into cloud automation to elastically scale-up and scale-out on demand. A single, consumption-based licensing model operates seamlessly across any cloud, public or private.
• Cloud visibility for network tools. Hawk provides traditional network tools with immediate, agentless visibility into layers 2-7 across any cloud network.
• Network visibility for cloud tools. Hawk delivers the “ground truth” of data-in-motion to cloud tools, such as visibility into east-west container traffic and unmanaged devices, through network application metadata.  

Thanks to this unparalleled elastic visibility, Gigamon Hawk radically simplifies hybrid infrastructure, eliminates security and compliance holes and provides IT teams full visibility of their cloud environments at scale. Hawk is available in a subscription, scale-as-you-grow, business model including embedded support and is comprised of:

• A suite of visibility nodes that can scale-up and scale-out as needed across any cloud network
• A cloud data warehouse for security and operational analytic applications
• A single, simple interface for either drag-and-drop manageability or programmatic orchestration

Hawk is integrated with AWS and other leading cloud platforms and tools, providing a unified view across hybrid infrastructure. Hawk for AWS includes features such as elastic visibility that automatically scales out to capture traffic from new EC2 instances, efficient distribution of mirrored traffic to multiple tool destinations, and the ability to extract and store network and application metadata in an AWS storage bucket for near real-time or historical analysis.

“Helping our customers derive value from their cloud investment and solutions is the most important aspect of our work at AWS. As organisations move workloads to the cloud, they want to ensure that they have clear visibility around potential vulnerabilities in their environment. Using AWS with Gigamon Hawk, for example by leveraging Amazon Athena to analyse application metadata collected by Hawk in S3 buckets, customers can gain the visibility they need across their hybrid – or pure cloud – infrastructure to be confident in its security, performance and scalability,” commented Scott Ward, Principal Solutions Architect at AWS.

“We are seeing most of our clients accelerate the movement of their mission-critical apps and workloads to the cloud, resulting in increasingly complex hybrid cloud infrastructures and interactions. This rising complexity challenges IT and InfoSec teams to provide the comprehensive traffic visibility and control that has become the hallmark of optimised and secure networks required to deliver the best user experience. Because traditional network monitoring tools struggle with visibility into cloud activity, increasing cloud adoption will heighten the presence and criticality of network blind spots. Here, cloud visibility and control problems can best be solved by next generation, cloud visibility solutions like those from Gigamon,” said Mark Leary, Research Director with IDC.

“While the path to the cloud varies for every enterprise, managing IT complexity is the universal challenge we have seen among the more than 700 customers who have purchased our cloud visibility fabric. We are proud to be working with AWS and other cloud leaders to deliver solutions that simplify our customers’ ability to reap the benefits of cloud adoption,” said Michael Dickman, Chief Product Officer at Gigamon. “With Hawk, we enable enterprises to simplify and secure today’s hybrid cloud networks and feel confident in their ability to scale for tomorrow’s business needs.”