VIAVI Solutions

Last Updated: 12th April 2024
Analyst Coverage: Paul Bevan and David Norfolk

VIAVI Solutions can trace its roots back to 1932 through Wandel and Goltermann, a German company involved in radio receiving and test equipment. During the second half of the 20th century, various mergers and acquisitions, all within the broad telecommunications equipment and test market, transformed the company into a significant US based corporation, JDS Uniphase. In 2000, following further acquisitions, the company was renamed JDSU. Then in 2015 JDSU split into two separate and independent businesses, VIAVI Solutions and Lumentum Holdings. The latest financial reports show that VIAVI Solutions had global revenues of $1.14bn over 41,000 employees across 50 worldwide locations. Latest share price indicates a market capitalisation of $3.5bn.

The company manufactures testing and monitoring equipment for networks. It also develops optical technology used for a range of applications including material quality control, currency anti-counterfeiting and 3D motion sensing. However, Bloor focuses its research on VIAVI Solutions specialisation in application and network management, concentrating on promoting end-user experience and security forensics through performance optimisation and elimination of speed issues. It offers both software and hardware appliances for proactive network monitoring and analysis.

It is essentially vendor-neutral and supports hybrid multi-cloud networking, including on-premises solutions if appropriate. It operates internationally, with a wide range of partners, and is a key player in significant growth areas such as 5G, Fibre and 3D Sensing.

It publishes an Annual State of the Network Report, documenting the issues affecting hundreds of network and security professionals and how DevOps-style approaches to network and security management have been used to address them. The report can be found here. It also publishes a blog offering perspectives on industry issues and VIAVI innovations as they arise.

VIAVI also takes its social responsibilities seriously; see the letter from Oleg Khaykin, its President and CEO.

Company Info

Headquarters: 1445 South Spectrum Boulevard, Suite 102, Chandler, AZ 85286, United States
Telephone: +1 408 404 3600

VIAVI Solutions Observer Sentry

Last Updated: 12th April 2024

What is it?

Fig 01 - Traffic flow summary

VIAVI Observer Sentry is a Threat Exposure Management solution designed for Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is the latest addition to the Observer platform, that integrates a suite of products ideal for satisfying business goals and overcoming challenges across the entire IT enterprise lifecycle.

Observer Sentry provides visualisation and analysis of AWS and Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) environments enabling customers to proactively pinpoint where their cloud resources are exposed and to prioritise remediation according to which resources are the most vulnerable. Sentry integrates readily available AWS VPC Flow Logs to gain a comprehensive view of traffic to and from exposed resources. Its intuitive views highlight misconfigurations, overly permissive settings and risky combinations of exposure paths to identify where mitigation is needed most to avoid compromise.

Customer Quotes

“95% of organisations are moderately or extremely concerned about their public cloud security posture.”
Cybersecurity Insiders

“Only two respondents out of more than 300 were satisfied with their current level of network visibility.”
VIAVI Solutions 2023 State of the Network

What does it do?

Fig 02 - VIAVI Observer Sentry

Observer Sentry provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) based threat exposure management with traffic insights. It provides attack path visualisation enabling organisations to see their AWS environment from the perspective of attackers. Sentry discovers and combines internal attack paths with focused external attack surface scanning to identify unintended high-risk exposures. Displayed in intuitive graphs, Sentry analyses the business impact of high-risk exposures, helping organisations prioritise remediation activities.

The latest addition to Observer Sentry is its traffic insights capabilities. Traffic insights goes beyond identifying potential exposures, providing the ability to determine if an exposed resource has been compromised or an unpatched vulnerability has been exploited. With these additional capabilities, Sentry is now able to move beyond identifying what could happen to show what is actually happening. Through the integration of traffic data provided by AWS VPC Flow Logs, Sentry users gain visibility into inbound and outbound connection attempts and established connections by port and protocol along with the volume of data associated with a connection. Through integration with VIAVI Observer Apex users can perform a detailed forensic traffic analysis of any conversations of interest or concern.

The combination of threat exposure analysis and traffic insights enables a deeper understanding into high-risk exposures, proactive identification, prioritisation and remediation of threats.

Why should you care?

VIAVI Observer Sentry is optimised to support business goals and improve overall cloud security posture by reducing the attack surface. It identifies security exposures, reveals whether bad actors have compromised exposed resources or exploited known vulnerabilities, and helps to prioritise most critical risks for quick remediation. VIAVI streamlines complex data into clarity, delivering actionable insights with fewer metrics. It allows organisations to identify, prioritise, and remediate risks with a proactive approach for protecting their cloud environments.

It is designed for use by DevOps, SecOps and cloud architects to provide visibility into the critical risks they face in the dynamic AWS environment in which they work.

VIAVI Observer Sentry is designed to provide maximum security with minimal effort. It can be set up and running within a matter of minutes and enables security teams to monitor their AWS environment, map and visualise resources and their relationships so that security teams can focus on what matters most.

The bottom line

As organisations undergo digital transformation efforts and move ever more resources to the cloud, visibility into what is happening in the cloud environment is vital for securing operations. Through provision of threat exposure and traffic flow analysis, Observer Sentry will prove to be effective for any organisation looking to better secure its
AWS environment.