Enhancing network monitoring and cybersecurity through optical circuit switching

Network environments are constantly growing in complexity alongside the rise in global data usage. With millions of gigabytes of data traversing global networks every minute, organisations must be able to identify and mitigate cyber threats in real time.

A successful cyber-attack can lead to severe reputational damage for commercial entities such as data centres or telecom providers if customer data is compromised. Earlier this year, T-Mobile publicity acknowledged eight data breaches between 2018 and 2023, with one exposing the personal data of at least 76.6 million people.

With banks, insurance companies, stock exchanges, healthcare providers and municipal authorities all relying on successful network monitoring, service providers need the right solutions in place to ensure the highest levels of security, while complying with all the legal requirements governing such activity in their country. Government agencies also rely on the same process to protect national interests and public safety.

The ongoing challenge

Effectively monitoring network traffic for interference or manipulation is both time-consuming and expensive. The access point for monitoring could be anywhere from a submarine cable landing station to a carrier facility, with the total number of fibres to review well into the thousands, depending on location. Each fibre can carry petabytes of data, giving operators an almost insurmountable amount of information to review.

The monitoring process is complicated further by the wide variety of formats, data rates, wavelengths and protocols found within transmissions. Advanced analysis and collection tools that break down traffic on network links to identify signals of interest are deployed, yet the sheer number of lines to monitor makes use of these an expensive approach if a high level of continuous visibility is required.

A remedy for cost-effective network monitoring

Optical circuit switches (OCS) hold the key to enhanced monitoring, providing a more efficient solution for operators. By inserting switches such as POLATIS, from HUBER+SUHNER, between the network probes and the auto-discovery tools and programming them to pre-select fibres on a rotating basis, the traffic on many fibres can be analysed and, if there is cause for concern, saved on a database for further investigation. This enables operators to identify the few traffic streams of interest for more continuous monitoring and disregard the vast amount of innocent traffic, enabling them to carry out security checks in a cost-effective manner.

For network surveying and collection environments to operate successfully, they require quick and reliable switching. Optical circuit switches such as POLATIS provide the lowest insertion loss available and come with stable connections that add no noise to the signals traversing them, thus preserving the integrity of the optical signals under review, while making signal-agnostic connections regardless of the wavelength, protocol or data rate present on the fibre. They have been designed to handle large port counts, supporting configurations that can scale up to 384x384, which is essential for complex network environments.

This innovative technology now means hundreds of optical connections can be switched with near-zero latency to enable the seamless monitoring of traffic across multiple lanes or fibres. Additionally, operators can fully integrate optical circuit switches with existing network monitoring tools and scale their systems owing to the switches being fully agnostic to data protocols.

Looking to the future

With an ever-increasing level of threat, it is clear that demand for robust monitoring and enhanced cybersecurity measures is not going to decline. Innovative companies, like HUBER+SUHNER, are changing the game in optical circuit switching technology and their developments in this field are enhancing the network security and monitoring landscape. Adopting OCS technology gives everyone from data centre operators to government agencies the tools to monitor today’s complex digital landscape, and ensure a safer and more secure network environment for all.