With the shift by higher education to online learning during the global pandemic, an attack by malicious hackers has become a real risk. But what if one attack against a university came from another school?

This unusual situation was discovered recently by NetScout Systems Inc., which helped a major unnamed university thwart an attack against the school’s online testing platform. NetScout’s systems were able to identify the attack pattern, and the university’s information-technology staff was able to trace it back to another school by analyzing traffic flows.

It was yet another example of why visibility becomes critical to avoid network disruption.

“We continue to build incredibly complex systems with machines talking to machines,” said Paul Barrett (pictured), chief technology officer for enterprise and federal business at NetScout. “To operate these kinds of environments without maximum visibility is almost terrifying — it’s like driving a racing car without a safety harness. We can provide visibility into the interactions between all of these different systems.”

Barrett spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. They discussed how NetScout deals with issues surrounding automation and system performance and creating smart data to manage complex network traffic. (* Disclosure below.)

Handling voice and video issues

Continued advances in automation have raised risk levels, according to Barrett. The other issue is performance monitoring, where a sudden rise in network use, such as online learning or work-from-home arrangements, can overwhelm systems that were not designed to handle unanticipated workloads.

“Those types of services, particularly voice and video as real-time services, are very susceptible to poor network transmission,” Barrett noted. “It’s critical to understand where problems like voice and video quality are arising in your own network. You can isolate the problem in your own network, figure out what you need to do and remediate it.”

To continuously monitor and analyze network traffic, NetScout leverages data tools to provide macro-level insight into system performance.

“We call the data we produce, the metadata, adaptive service intelligence, and we sometimes refer to it as smart data,” Barrett explained. “How can we take all of that complex traffic that’s coming out of a network and map it to a simple, but actionable set of high-quality data? That’s always been our focus.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: NetScout Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither NetScout nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE