What Is Network Visibility?

Imagine hackers as digital burglars. They don’t kick down the door to your house in the middle of the day. Instead, they slip through an open window while you sleep and quietly blend into the regular décor and house traffic.

These hackers can spend days, weeks, months, or even years in the background. They don’t make their presence known, allowing them to silently gather valuable information over time. They’re skilled thieves who go unnoticed and evade traditional security measures that only look for obvious signs of entry. They could continue lurking and quietly wreak havoc if you don't notice any damage.

In this environment of subtle breaches, network visibility is the equivalent of high-tech surveillance, capable of detecting the slightest irregularities that typically go unnoticed. It’s not about catching the intruders when they break in — it’s having the constant awareness to spot the subtle signs they leave behind as they move through your system. They can also help you spot weaknesses in your environment and ensure you are as secure as possible.

Here’s what you need to know about network visibility, why it matters, and tips for getting better insights into your network.

What is network visibility?

The definition of network visibility is simple: seeing across your entire digital footprint, so you can know and understand everything that is in and moving through your network.

However, don’t mistake it for being easy or inconsequential: it is a crucial aspect of cybersecurity and has a widespread impact on your organization. Network visibility allows you to:

• Know how your company data is used and where it is.
• Identify typical versus non-typical user behavior.
• Find misconfigurations or vulnerabilities in your network.
• Determine where activities originate from and pass through your network.

When you know what is standard for your network — its baseline — you can identify system behaviors and users that don’t match. This is one example of anomaly-based threat detection.

(Splunk knows that the path to digital resilience starts with foundational visibility: being able to see across the entire digital footprint. See what that can do for security and observability.)

Traditional vs. modern network visibility

Network visibility was once limited to the organization itself — the networks you own and maintain. Today, however, companies must ensure security and observability as they connect with providers and remote workers. In fact, almost 90% of surveyed cybersecurity leaders were concerned about third parties in their network.

As a result, network visibility is more critical than ever to see exactly who is entering your network and where they go once they’re there. Ensuring that your network remains safe even with increased traffic is critical.

(Related reading: third-party risk management & lateral movement.)

Why network visibility matters: the benefits

Our world relies on complex and busy networks. That makes network visibility a significant challenge. Is the time and effort still worth it for organizations? Absolutely! Here are some reasons to prioritize network visibility:

Identify vulnerabilities

One of the best ways to handle cybersecurity is to stop potential breaches before they happen. How? With offensive security and better defense security.

However, many companies have vulnerabilities without realizing it: over 85% of commercial applications have at least one critical vulnerability. Ensuring your network visibility will help to:

• Expose vulnerabilities.
• Limit the blind spots in your network.

Shining a light on your network blind spots will automatically reduce your chances of a cyberattack and make your IT team more productive. Based on the insights and patterns from network monitoring, your teams can find and troubleshoot problems faster.

(Related reading: common vulnerability types.)

Find threats faster

Great network visibility will help you understand what is expected at your organization. This means that it’s easier to spot unusual and malicious behavior and stop it faster. Seeing many files exiting your network or activity at unusual off-hour times, for example, could alert you to an insider threat.

This is especially essential as organizations adopt newer technologies, such as IoT devices, that aren’t protected with the same software and tools as desktops, phones, and laptops. By recognizing patterns, you can monitor the devices at a network level to increase your cyber defenses. If your IoT device sends a large amount of data out of your network, for example, it can alert you to a potential attack.

Network visibility is also crucial for investigating attacks and remediating them. Enhanced monitoring will help you identify and contain threats.

(Related reading: how to monitor IoT devices.)

Limit downtime

Let’s be clear: visibility doesn’t automatically guarantee uptime. However, it does help your IT team spot trouble to minimize the downtime you experience when there are issues. Plus, network visibility software and tools give a great look into your network's overall performance and health.

This is critical to ensure your business-critical services and applications run smoothly and are available when needed. This helps you ensure continuity and reduce the impact of network outages.

Optimize performance

When you understand the amount and type of traffic that flows through your network, your network and system administrators can better understand and resolve problems that cause performance issues and slowdowns.

Your network visibility strategy can help you find network performance issues like bottlenecks and bandwidth consumption. All of this means better overall network performance for your organization.

Enhance business growth

Informed decision-making is crucial for business growth and scalability. Network visibility provides comprehensive, real-time insights into all aspects of your network infrastructure, including:

• Performance metrics
• Security threats
• Data traffic patterns
• Resource utilization

Network visibility gives your IT teams and decision-makers critical information to ensure the current infrastructure supports business objectives. These insights can help you:

• Prioritize investments and improvements that directly impact business growth.
• Identify underutilized resources and allocate resources more wisely.
• Optimize costs and ensure your infrastructure is scaled efficiently to support business growth — essentially, that your tech stack is futureproofed for business growth.

Adhere to cybersecurity standards

Many cybersecurity frameworks, such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, consider network visibility a crucial aspect of maintaining security.

NIST’s report Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Organization recommends that organizations maintain visibility so they can detect:

1. Unauthorized network, local, and remote connections.
2. Indicators of potential attacks and Indicators of compromise.

NIST recommends that companies leverage monitoring capabilities or place monitoring devices throughout their systems to find and analyze unusual activities.

See across and understand your entire tech stack, including cloud visibility, for outages, cyberthreats, and more critical information with Splunk.

How to gain more, better network visibility

There are several ways to enhance network visibility in your organization. These will help you gain deeper insights into your network, ensuring you are equipped to deal with issues early, optimize resources, and support long-term growth.

Accurate and consistent data collection

With the amount of data organizations use today, automated tools are critical to gather crucial data — no matter your business size. Networks rely on a significant amount of data, and sorting it manually is challenging and inefficient. The right tools will help you with a reliable data stream that reflects the real-time status and performance of every element in your system.

The accuracy and consistency of your data are crucial for:

• Making informed decisions.
• Responding to issues proactively.
• Scaling network operations efficiently.

For example, log management tools play a crucial role in this process. They provide a detailed account of network activities — such as traffic patterns, system events, and security incidents — all of which are essential for robust network visibility and making informed decisions.

SSL/TLS Decryption

Most traffic is encrypted to prevent bad actors from intercepting sensitive or valuable information. However, inspecting and analyzing traffic patterns can make network visibility more challenging. To achieve visibility, it’s essential to selectively decrypt sessions at the edge.

Leveraging proxy-based architecture will help you decrypt traffic, examine the tools for performance issues or threats, and then re-encrypt the information before routing it to the intended destination. This approach will help you maintain security and achieve visibility of these encrypted flows.

Robust access controls, encryption key management, and secure storage for the decrypted data are crucial to ensure security, but SSL/TLS decryption may help improve your monitoring coverage (though it can come with caveats).

Clear, user-friendly notifications

Network visibility is more than just analyzing data: it requires an adept understanding of your system, especially if something goes wrong, and how to fix it. That means that clear communication is vital. How can you understand the data if the core message gets lost in translation?

Clear direction is crucial for deciding what steps to take after an alert. Once you know something is happening on the network, you need to know how to address it, especially if you don’t have a team of cyber professionals. The right tools will help you understand what is going on and the practical next step. They help provide context and limit noise so that you save time and get insights into your network.

(Explore the Splunk product portfolio, offering a unified platform for observability and cybersecurity.)

Specialized-support threat assessment

For effective network visibility, you need to leverage solutions beyond basic monitoring. Look for tools incorporating advanced data analytics, Machine Learning, and customizable alert systems. These features will help you:

• Recognize important patterns
• Filter out false positives
• Get accurate insights in a clear, actionable format

Many tools that help with threat monitoring and detection struggle to separate the unusual from the routine. In fact, nearly half of all threat alerts are false positives. These false positives impact your network visibility and take your attention from the areas that need monitoring. Worst of all, they often lead to alert fatigue.

Cybersecurity alert fatigue happens when your cybersecurity team is exposed to countless alerts, emails, and push notifications that are often false positives. It’s unsurprising, then, that organizations between 1,500- 4,000 employees don’t investigate 30% of the alerts they get. They become desensitized to notifications and alerts — they’re instead overwhelmed by them.

It’s essential to have tools that weed out the noise so you know when to act and get visibility when it matters.

Achieving network visibility

Network visibility is a crucial tool for organizations today. As bad actors find better ways to sneak in and stay around, stealing data, network visibility gives you the defense to improve surveillance and keep your organization safe.

Even as networks expand in complexity, network visibility doesn’t have to be challenging. With the right tools and cyber strategy, you can not only stop data breaches but also fix vulnerabilities, decrease downtime, and get meaningful insights into your network.