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Any modern enterprise security strategy must consider how to manage increasing complexity at an accelerating rate of change. Network operators are taking aim at a moving target as multi-cloud, Zero-Trust, and AI adoption introduces new uncertainties and security teams grapple with:
Distributed, hybrid networks that increase failure points and attack surfaces
Accelerated updates and refreshes from multiple vendors
Protection of private and sensitive data as a top priority requiring massive efforts
Growing regulatory and compliance requirements
Keeping up with these changes while maintaining a solid security posture requires a comprehensive and proactive strategy, supported by new tools built for today’s challenges.
And critically, automation must be part of the equation.
Automated testing frameworks can validate security across diverse deployment environments and ensure that enterprise networks remain resilient in the face of rapid change. This was the overarching message Spirent delivered in our recent Bright Talk webinar discussion with John Grady, Principal Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.
Let’s dive into some of the key highlights of our conversation and explore the latest market developments driving new needs, results of early testing work, and strategies for getting started.
The role of security testing and automation in diverse, distributed networks
As discussed in our previous blog, automating security validation helps enterprises strike a balance between accelerating innovation and maintaining operational resiliency.
Security performance testing reduces threat risks by validating security effectiveness under real-world conditions. By emulating threats with a continuously updated library of thousands of attack vectors, the network’s ability to identify and mitigate or block attacks can be assessed alongside its recovery resiliency.
Every enterprise network is unique, requiring tailored threat models, legitimate traffic patterns and test plans. Security controls, configurations, and policies vary based on the environment, whether in the cloud, a data center, or elsewhere.
Automation speeds testing and ensures comprehensive coverage of a diverse set of security controls distributed across enterprise networks. This helps businesses avoid costly network disruptions by proactively managing continuous vendor updates, policy changes, and evolving threats.
Automated testing also gives organizations empirical data to demonstrate that network and security investments are effective. Baseline metrics (e.g., bandwidth, concurrency, latencies, blocked attacks) give networking and security teams a way to actively manage and correct performance and security drifts that can occur as networks and security architectures continuously evolve.
A regulatory revelation: continuous testing reduces deployment failures
The growing trend toward automated, frequent technology refreshes and updates from multiple vendors, as well as continuous CI/CD deployment into the production network, elevates risks.
Proactive risk management avoids outages by incorporating continuous, automated pre-deployment testing before changes are pushed into the network. These tests must measure reliability, compliance, performance, and security effectiveness.
Heavily regulated industries, including telecommunications, energy, and finance, rely on mission critical networks where any outages, security breaches, or data losses are unacceptable. New regulations, such as the EU Digital Operational Resiliency Act (DORA) acknowledge this reality, requiring financial institutions to perform ongoing infrastructure testing and furnish evidence that testing has occurred.
Automation in testing is essential for conforming to DORA and similar regulatory requirements, since financial institutions have many types of network and security devices with various configurations. This complexity results in a massive amount of testing to cover all possibilities. Regulations also require documentation that shows what was tested, how it was tested, the measurements taken during the tests, and the pass/fail verdicts.
Automated security and resilience testing reduces test times and slashes Capex
Based on studies Spirent has conducted with customers, enterprises can expect to see an ROI in less than 18 months by deploying automated, continuous security and resiliency testing, with benefits spanning:
Reduced outages
Reduced regulatory fines and legal actions
Reduced compliance costs
Validated policy optimization
Better sharing of expensive resources
Efficiencies gained
Reduced lab power consumption
A top-10 global bank reduced test setup times from four months to eight hours when it moved from manual to automated testing. As a result, its annual lab spending decreased by 95%.
Security is a core part of digital transformation strategies and security testing should be no different. Automated testing ensures greater efficiency, minimizes operational overhead, reduces risk, and enhances both security and performance across enterprise networks.
Security performance and resiliency testing helps ensure network and security products work as advertised and can handle the load the environment requires. Given the rapid pace of innovation today, security performance testing is critical for success, risk management, and compliance of transformation initiatives.
Listen to our Bright Talk webinar discussion to learn more about enterprise network security testing, how to leverage automation to address surging complexity and risks, and how automated security testing helps enterprises address the complexities of modern networks while maintaining business continuity and minimizing risk.
Learn more about Spirent network security and performance testing solutions and fully integrated lab and test automation portfolio.
