Ixia Solutions Help Ensure Continuous and Secured Delivery of Applications and Services Across COMBINED ENDEAVOR 2012 Global Network

CALABASAS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--For the third consecutive year, Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA) BreakingPoint has provided a fully operational network assessment solution for COMBINED ENDEAVOR, a military communications and cyber defense exercise run by U.S. European Command (EUCOM) and NATO nations. The Ixia BreakingPoint solution creates realistic military network traffic conditions including user behavior, blended application traffic and live malicious attacks, establishing the ideal scenarios for COMBINED ENDEAVOR C4 systems multinational exercise.

“Our focus at COMBINED ENDEAVOR 2012 was to help the participating nations troubleshoot network issues in real time with passive network solutions using Ixia Anue NTO, and then validate the application performance, security and stability improvement using the Ixia BreakingPoint cyber range in cooperation with the participating nations’ network specialists.”

COMBINED ENDEAVOR used Ixia BreakingPoint solutions to ensure seamless communication between NATO and partner nations at all times, measure and harden the resiliency of the global network and validate overall quality of service.

News Highlights

COMBINED ENDEAVOR 2012, the largest communication interoperability training exercise in the world, linked approximately 1,500 communication and cyber defense experts to work together primarily at the Joint Multinational Training Command’s training center at U.S. Army Garrison Grafenwoehr, Germany, and from numerous forward sites across Europe as well. The training, designed to enhance communication network interoperability and information exchange among nations with common stability, security and sustainment goals and objectives, brought together 40 NATO and partner nations.

Ixia BreakingPoint cyber range solutions were used during COMBINED ENDEAVOR 2012 to create the behavior of real users and the unique network conditions needed to validate performance, security and stability of mission-critical network communications under real-world conditions and realistic military network load. Additionally, the onsite Ixia experts from the EMEA L4/L7 Application and Security Business Development Team provided COMBINED ENDEAVOR:

The Ixia Anue NTO along with the C2TECH NetRASAT probe and Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall, which were used to troubleshoot issues using their deep packet inspection capabilities on common applications protocols and proprietary military applications protocols.
Multiple hands-on training sessions including Green Team and Red Team exercises for participating nations using the Ixia BreakingPoint cyber range solutions for:
- Network security assessments to validate the resiliency and quality of service (QoS) for a large number of deployed routers, firewalls and intrusion prevention systems (IPS).
- Application performance assessments to validate application and services performance, stability, and QoS for a large number of deployed routers, VPN gateways, firewalls and IPSs.

Commentary

“Today the government and military are faced with the daunting task of delivering continued communications and services even while under persistent attack. In order to manage this, COMBINED ENDEAVOR brings together network and cyber security experts from around Europe to build a resilient network infrastructure that ensures that continuous communication is available between NATO and its partner nations. By mimicking real-life threats, the Ixia BreakingPoint cyber range solutions and Ixia Anue NTO prepare all of us for the inevitable attacks, and more importantly provide the insight we need to continue critical communications while under attack. COMBINED ENDEAVOR is a unique C4 systems multinational exercise that brings together cyber defense experts from 40 nations to discuss data, voice and video network communications challenges and solutions,” said Gregory Fresnais, Director of EMEA L4/L7 Application and Security Business Development Team at Ixia. “Our focus at COMBINED ENDEAVOR 2012 was to help the participating nations troubleshoot network issues in real time with passive network solutions using Ixia Anue NTO, and then validate the application performance, security and stability improvement using the Ixia BreakingPoint cyber range in cooperation with the participating nations’ network specialists."

Nations participating in CE12 included:

Afghanistan, Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, NATO, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and United States.

About COMBINED ENDEAVOR

Since 1995, EUCOM has conducted the COMBINED ENDEAVOR annually, with the mission of building interoperability between North American and European nations to support command and control for military operations and to respond to crises or disasters. Each year, the COMBINED ENDEAVOR exercise measures and validates the resiliency of mission-critical network infrastructure. The COMBINED ENDEAVOR exercise ensures that seamless communications between NATO and partner nations remain available at all times, especially during high-stress events.

About Ixia

Ixia solutions deliver actionable insight through real-time monitoring, real-world testing, and rapid assessment. This end-to-end visibility provides organizations with a complete understanding into user behavior, security vulnerabilities, network capacity, application performance, and IT resiliency. From the lab to the network to the cloud, Ixia solutions enable its customers to optimize networks and data centers to accelerate, secure, and scale application delivery. For more information, visit www.ixiacom.com.

For more information on Ixia’s cyber range and NTO solutions, visit Ixia at Cyber Defence & Network Security January 28 – 31, 2013, in London.