Network Packet Brokers
The critical enabler to cyber security resilience and network monitoring.
Modern companies depend on network visibility to protect their infrastructure, maintain service availability, and rapidly investigate operational or security issues.
Whether monitoring for cyber threats, troubleshooting application performance, or capturing packets for forensic analysis, every visibility tool relies on one thing – access to just the right network traffic in the required speeds and formats.
A Network Packet Broker (NPB) sits at the heart of the visibility architecture, intelligently acquiring, optimising, and distributing network traffic to the tools that need it.
Rather than every monitoring and security platform independently accessing production traffic, the Network Packet Broker acts as a central control point, ensuring every tool receives the right packets, at the right time, in the right format.
Why Network Packet Brokers are essential
As companies deploy increasing numbers of cyber security and monitoring platforms, network visibility quickly becomes more complex.
Without a Network Packet Broker, multiple tools often compete for access to the same traffic, leading to inefficient network designs, unnecessary hardware, duplicated data, and increased operational complexity. Security tools may receive more traffic than they can process, while monitoring platforms waste valuable resources analysing packets that aren’t relevant to their purpose.
A Network Packet Broker solves these challenges by intelligently managing traffic before it reaches downstream tools, improving efficiency while ensuring security and monitoring platforms receive the data they need.
Built for security and operational resilience
Network Packet Brokers support two of the most important objectives within modern IT environments:
Security platforms such as IDS/IPS, NDR, packet capture, and forensic analysis tools all depend on reliable packet visibility.
A Network Packet Broker ensures these tools receive complete, optimised traffic feeds while simplifying the deployment of resilient, high availability security architectures. Traffic can be intelligently distributed across multiple appliances, helping companies improve resilience while reducing the operational impact of maintenance or hardware failures.
Application performance monitoring, VoIP analysis, infrastructure monitoring, and network troubleshooting platforms all rely on accurate packet data.
By delivering only the relevant traffic to each monitoring tool, Network Packet Brokers improve the accuracy of operational monitoring while reducing unnecessary processing overhead, enabling Engineers to identify and resolve issues more quickly.
Better security & monitoring tool ROI
Network Packet Brokers don’t just improve visibility – they help companies get more from the tools they already own.
By filtering unnecessary traffic, removing duplicate packets, and optimising data before forwarding it, Network Packet Brokers reduce the processing burden placed on security and monitoring platforms. This can extend the effective lifespan of existing appliances, delay costly hardware upgrades, and improve the overall efficiency of the visibility infrastructure.
Intelligent traffic management
Modern networks generate enormous volumes of data, but not every tool needs to analyse every packet.
Network Packet Brokers intelligently aggregate traffic from multiple TAPs and SPAN ports before selectively distributing only the relevant traffic to each connected platform. This reduces unnecessary processing, simplifies network architecture, and ensures every monitoring and security tool receives precisely the traffic it requires.
The result is a more efficient, scalable, and manageable visibility infrastructure.
Packet optimisation
Different monitoring and security platforms have different traffic requirements.
Network Packet Brokers optimise packet streams through capabilities such as aggregation, load balancing, traffic replication, filtering, and header manipulation, ensuring downstream tools receive traffic in the format best suited to their operation.
This improves tool performance, maximises appliance utilisation, and enables companies to scale their visibility architecture as network demands evolve.
Data hygiene & compliance
Not every monitoring or security tool needs access to every piece of information contained within a packet.
Network Packet Brokers improve data quality by removing duplicate packets, filtering unnecessary traffic, and eliminating information that offers little operational value to downstream platforms. This reduces the volume of data that monitoring and security tools need to process, improving efficiency while lowering storage and compute requirements.
Many Network Packet Brokers can also anonymise sensitive information – such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), payment data, or other confidential fields, before traffic is forwarded to monitoring and analysis platforms.
This helps companies to support compliance with regulations such as the UK GDPR by ensuring Engineers and operational teams only have access to the information they need to perform their role, without exposing sensitive data unnecessarily.
The result is cleaner, more relevant packet data, stronger privacy controls, and greater confidence that monitoring activities support both operational objectives and regulatory obligations.
Independent expertise you can trust
Choosing the right Network Packet Broker isn’t simply about selecting a product – it’s about designing the right visibility architecture.
As an independent value-added reseller, we work with leading Network Packet Broker manufacturers to recommend the solution that best fits your technical, operational and commercial requirements. This means you don’t need to spend time evaluating multiple vendors or navigating competing product portfolios – we’ve already done the hard work for you.
With decades of experience designing, deploying, and managing network visibility solutions for many of the UK’s leading financial institutions and network operators, Red Helix is one of the UK’s most experienced specialists in Network Packet Broker technologies.
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