SmartBiz IT Research Library

The temptation to deploy and rely on automated monitoring, analysis and response technologies can be as overwhelming to network administrators today as the sirens calls were to Ulysses and his crew during the Golden age of Greece. There's little danger that modern-day IT staff will perish if they trust the fate of their networks to automation, but organizations that rely too heavily on automation may fall prey to the "out of sight, out of mind" syndrome, and attacks may go unobserved. IT's analysis skills may erode over time as staff are diverted to other tasks. Users may introduce unauthorized applications that disrupt essential business applications before they are identified, and either accommodated or removed.

Many of today's sophisticated security and network products have their origins in command line applications and scripts that innovative IT administrators developed to monitor, collect, analyze and respond to security-related events before anyone thought to introduce commercial solutions that automate these processes. Variants and descendants of these applications are readily available as open source software, freeware or shareware. Preparing a toolkit composed of feature-rich traffic generation, capture and analysis tools is simple and inexpensive.