Mazu, TippingPoint Team Up

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Mazu Networks, the leading[1] provider of Network Behavior Analysis (NBA) systems, today announced an alliance to integrate Mazu with TippingPoint’s quarantine solution. The integration enables enterprises to resolve network and security issues quickly and accurately.

“The combination of Mazu with TippingPoint provides customers with a powerful solution for addressing a multitude of network operations and network security challenges,” said Paul Brady, CEO, Mazu Networks. “While Mazu provides enterprises with a global view of how users, applications, hosts and devices behave on a network, TippingPoint enables a granular enforcement option. Now the market’s leading NBA system can work in conjunction with TippingPoint’s solutions to greatly improve network and security operations for enterprise customers.”

Mazu provides continuous global visibility into how users, applications, hosts and devices behave on a network, delivering information on how current activity differs from typical behavior. Users immediately understand who is talking to whom, what applications and services are running, where the traffic is flowing and if there are any meaningful changes that indicate a network issue, security threat or application problem. After identifying an issue, Mazu can now send commands such as containing infected devices for remediation to the TippingPoint Security Management System (SMS) for enforcement. Further, with Mazu, TippingPoint’s quarantine can move from policy violation alerting to inline policy enforcement.

“SEM and NMS are limited in the depth of what they provide into event views. NBA systems provide a layer of intelligence of what applications, systems and users are doing inside the network,” said Chris Liebert, senior analyst, Security Solutions and Services, Yankee Group. “Their ability to integrate with management and monitoring tools is critical to providing valuable context to alerts in those views.[2]”

As network environments become more complex and as the number of issues that can jeopardize security and IT operations grow in frequency, sophistication and variation, the need for more intelligent and granular remediation is critical. The intelligence that Mazu provides when it discovers a security or network operations issue combined with Tipping Point’s enforcement capabilities enables enterprises to effectively respond to atypical network behavior.

A recent Gartner research report states, “Network behavior analysis (NBA) can fill the gap left by policy- and signature-based point solutions, such as firewalls, intrusion detection system/intrusion prevention system (IDS/IPS), and security information and event management (SIEM), which may miss threats for which they are not specifically configured to detect. NBA technologies are decision support systems that give visibility to a knowledgeable operator who can interpret, investigate and appropriately respond to a variety of suspicious activities on the network.[3]”

“This is an important step in the evolution of enterprise security,” said Neal Hartsell, vice president of marketing for TippingPoint. “Security is getting more complex to administer and manage. One way to alleviate complexity is to extend the power of our IPS’s traffic classification and policy enforcement strength to Network Behavior Analysis systems – enabling customers to maximize their existing security investments, automate end point security, and reduce the cost and complexity of overall security policy enforcement.”

Mazu Networks

TippingPoint Technologies Inc.