Network Security and Performance: The Role of Professional Testing Services

In today’s dynamic digital landscape, maintaining a secure and efficient network is crucial for any organisation. Whether you’re rolling out a patch update, releasing new code, or upgrading your firewall, confidence in your network performance and security is essential. These updates and changes require rigorous testing to ensure everything runs smoothly. Network testing provides the confidence that these updates won’t introduce vulnerabilities or degrade performance. This is where professional network testing tools and services are essential, offering scalable and reliable solutions. 

The Critical Role of Traffic Generators 

Network traffic generators are essential tools in simulating real-world network conditions. Think of your network as a road where Ethernet packets travel. Just as you might test a road by driving different cars at various speeds, traffic generators simulate diverse network conditions. They send various types of traffic through your network to ensure it can handle different protocols, packet sizes, and speeds without issues like latency or packet loss. Traffic generators can simulate both legitimate and malicious traffic to ensure your firewall can block harmful data without slowing down the network. The network is monitored for lost packets or collisions, which can indicate performance issues or security vulnerabilities. 

Traffic generators can test the throughput by pushing significant amounts of traffic through the network, and observing how it handles loads to identify any potential bottlenecks or failures. It can also test to make sure your network tools (e.g. firewalls) can still detect and remove malicious traffic whilst passing the clean traffic. For instance, if you have a 10GB firewall, and loaded 8GB of legitimate traffic and 1GB of malicious traffic, if the device performance drops significantly under this load, or if it starts letting through potentially harmful traffic, it can indicate a need for further device optimisation. 

Testing your network when your organisation switches to a new protocol is essential. This ensures that your infrastructure is capable of handling the demands of your new protocol. By simulating this new protocol with traffic generators, we can foresee and mitigate any negative impacts that the change could create. Consider an organisation moving from one communication protocol to another for example, moving from Webex to Microsoft Teams. Without proper testing at full traffic load, this switch could cause performance degradation of the new app when used at normal capacity. Which in the case of Microsoft Teams could have widespread effects on your organisations ability to communicate.   

The Benefits of Professional Security Testing as a Service 

The testing as-a-service model provides professional testers with a high level of expertise, ensuring thorough and accurate assessments of your network’s security and performance. Whether you have a dedicated lab and frequently update patches or need one-off tests for significant upgrades, professional services can scale to meet your needs. One of the significant advantages of professional network testing services is that you don’t have to purchase expensive testing equipment. These services offer a cost-effective alternative, ensuring that your network/devices are thoroughly tested without the overhead of owning and maintaining the equipment yourself. 

Professional network testing services provide a scalable, cost-effective solution to ensure your networks security and performance. By simulating real-world conditions and potential threats, these services offer peace of mind and help you maintain a robust digital infrastructure.  

Whether you operate at a scale that requires a traffic generator as part of your network labs or opt for the testing as-a-service model, we have your needs covered. Organisations are increasingly reliant on seamless and secure network operations. As such the need for thorough and accurate testing is paramount. Investing in your network testing tools and services are vital for ensuring the integrity and reliability of your network performance.