‘Twas the month before Christmas, when all through the stores
Not a server was stirring, across the shop floors
KPIs had been set by the FD with care,
In hopes that large orders soon would be there;
Shop assistants were nestled all snug in their beds;
While visions of bonuses danced in their heads;
Retail bosses in their ‘kerchiefs, and IT in their caps,
Had just settled their brains for long winter’s naps,
When out on the LAN there arose such a clatter,
IT sprang from their beds to address huge network chatter
Away to their consoles they flew like a flash,
Tore down their VMs and cleared out the cache
The probes on the edge of the network were slow,
They just couldn’t collect every packet and flow,
When what to IT’s wondering eyes did appear,
But Cisco Tetration to settle their fear,
With an analytics engine so lively and quick,
They thought for a moment it must be a trick
Advanced algos whirring they crunched numbers for fun
Looked inside network and host to get the job done,
First switches, now servers, now apps and workloads
On, traffic on, patterns! on, across billions of flows
To the top of the stack! to the top of the Cloud!
Now scale away! scale away! scale away all!”
As code that before the big data tool fly,
IT finds the anomaly, and gives up a cry;
We’ve found it, we’ve found it, and the next thing they knew
Was both point of entry, and destination too—
And then, in an instant, forensics was done
The attacker was collared, the battle was won
IT drew in their heads, and were turning around,
When into the NOC the CISO came with a bound.
He was impressed for sure, from his head to his toes,
And he exclaimed with a shriek “So the network now knows’;
A bundle of policies he had flung on his back,
And he grinned at IT as he opened his pack.
His eyes—how they twinkled as he dished out the tasks
“I want robust security, is that too much to ask?”
IT nodded their heads, and then set to work
Mapping apps and dependencies across the network
The definitive baseline was soon at hand,
IT now had visibility more granular than sand;
They could see every packet, every flow, every speed
Monitor app behaviour and track every deed
Check policy changes, predict the impact of change
Even replay events; which seemed a tad strange;
But lo it was true, IT could travel in time
And have whitelists in place to prevent cyber crime
Compliance assured, across LAN, WAN and SAN
IT set about creating a seasonal plan
Using actionable insight from their Tetration appliance,
Sizing the spikes was now a matter of science
When the ecommerce director called, IT replied fast
“Outages should be but a thing of the past!”
But they heard him respond, “We’re not over the worst,”
“We’re all set for Christmas, but it’s peak period first!”
Don’t discount your data centre this Black Friday. Contact your Cisco account manager to find out more on how analytics can keep your network performing efficiently and securely.
Authors
1 Comments
Brilliant! It brought out the Holidays spirit and cheers. Thanks Ian