Case Study

Clemson University Balances
Network Performanceand Security with Helpfrom Gigamon

Challenge

To protect the university from cyberthreats,
we need to know our network — andGigamon — provides the visibility we needto know what’s traversing our network. Ourboard of directors and executive staff areprioritizing security, and they understandhow challenging it is for my team to do ourjobs without adequate network visibility.

After a 100Gb speed upgrade, Clemson University
needed an alternative approach to generating NetFlow
data for its security tools when the new networking
equipment no longer supported the format.
Solution• Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline• GigaSMART®
• GigaVUE-OS
Customer Benefits• Maintain security after 100Gb network upgrade• Increase NetFlow from 30,000 flows/second to70,000 flows/second

JOHN HOYT
Security Infrastructure and Operations Director,
Clemson University• Optimize existing security stack• Increase visibility by over 75 percent• Reduce false positives by over 60 percent© 2023 Gigamon. All rights reserved.

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CASE STUDY | CLEMSON UNIVERSITY

Clemson University’s sprawling 1,400-acre campus
houses everything from classrooms and researchtechnology to power stations, water treatment
plants and supervisory control and data acquisition(SCADA) systems.

“If I have questions, I turn to the community. If
someone reaches out to me, I’m happy to share lessons
learned. My community colleagues are an invaluable
source of trusted information, and when theyrecommended Gigamon, I listened.”

For Security Infrastructure and Operations Director
John Hoyt, protecting those assets and thenetwork they all connect to is a big job — and it is
not without obstacles.

Hoyt took their advice and sought support fromthe university’s upper management and executive
leadership to bring back NetFlow. After careful
due diligence, Clemson chose the Gigamon Deep
Observability Pipeline. It was cost-effective, supported
100Gb throughput, IPv6 and NetFlow Version 9.

“Students, faculty and researchers — including those
traveling abroad — all want to connect, collaborate
and share over an open network easily, but at thesame time, my team is responsible for protecting
sensitive, critical assets like their data and research,”
Hoyt explained.
“It can be tough to maintain a balance between
network access, performance and protection.”
For that reason, when the network operations (NetOps)
team chose to upgrade to a 100Gb network withequipment from Juniper Networks that did not support
NetFlow, Hoyt felt the scales tip a bit too far in favor of
speed over security.
For years, Hoyt had relied on NetFlow to analyze
network traffic, gain important insights into usage
patterns across systems and uncover potential
security risks.

Increased Visibility
With the new platform in place, Clemson had
confidence in its ability to perform broader and deeper
inspections of network traffic. Hoyt and his security
operations (SecOps) team rapidly increased the flowrate from 30,000 flows per second to 70,000 flows
per second.
“To protect the university from cyberthreats, we needto know our network — and Gigamon — provides
the visibility we need to know what’s traversing ournetwork,” said Hoyt. “Our board of directors andexecutive staff are prioritizing security, and they
understand how challenging it is for my team to do ourjobs without adequate network visibility.”“I understand the need to upgrade a network to meetthe demands for increased throughput,” said Hoyt. “Butfor my team, the loss of NetFlow was a serious issue.
We depend on NetFlow to give us the broad and deepvisibility we need to troubleshoot incidents and trackdown problem users and systems.”

Optimized Security Stack

Gigamon Recommended by
Trusted Peers

The university also extended intelligence withadditional GigaSMART® applications, which expand
the capabilities of the Gigamon Deep Observability
Pipeline. This allows organizations to perform functions
such as de-duplication, to avoid unnecessary packetprocessing overhead on security tools, and loadbalancing to spread monitoring across multiple devices
and enhance visibility into packet contents.

“Universities are different from corporations, which may
be less inclined to share ‘competitive’ information,” said
Hoyt. “In higher education, we’re in this fight together.

© 2023 Gigamon. All rights reserved.

With NetFlow support from the Gigamon Deep
Observability Pipeline, Hoyt’s team can now get a highlevel, metadata view of information — for example,
data location, author or timestamp — and, with Flow
Mapping®, they can prioritize which tools see what data.

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CASE STUDY | CLEMSON UNIVERSITY“I always felt we were barely scratching the surface
with our network monitoring,” said Hoyt. “My highestpriority was finding a solution that allowed us to watch
more than the ocean of data passing at the network
border, which allowed us to sharpen our focus on thedata we care about most.”
Today the SecOps team feels more assured that they
are not missing important traffic and have the ability tohighlight and inspect activity of interest. This approach
helped them reduce false positives by 60 percent andoptimize inline security tool performance.
Ultimately, with the help of Gigamon, Clemson wasable to support its staff and research students with
the network speed their projects require while also
ensuring that the university’s security posture remains
strong against today’s evolving threat landscape.

About Gigamon
Gigamon offers a deep observability pipeline thatharnesses actionable network-level intelligenceto amplify the power of observability tools. Thispowerful combination enables IT organizations toassure security and compliance governance, speed
root-cause analysis of performance bottlenecks, andlower operational overhead associated with managing
hybrid and multi-cloud IT infrastructures. The result:modern enterprises realize the full transformational
promise of the cloud. Gigamon serves more than 4,000
customers worldwide, including over 80 percent ofFortune 100 enterprises, nine of the 10 largest mobile
network providers, and hundreds of governments andeducational organizations worldwide. To learn more,
please visit gigamon.com.

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