A leading North American service provider turned to Mu Dynamics to ensure their next-generation firewall would perform as expected once deployed – they wanted to make sure it could handle all of today’s most popular applications, as well as future applications, and would be resilient to the rapidly growing number and types of security threats.

Testing Requirements

In order to test the DPI capability for identifying and classifying applications at production levels of traffic, the Service Provider needed a testing solution that could accurately recreate the mix of applications they expected to see on the live network. This is the only way they could validate that the firewall would function correctly once deployed.

Challenges

Historically, the provider needed to use a number of point tools across teams to test different security functions, which made the testing complex and time consuming. In addition, legacy testing technologies, which use synthetic traffic to test applications, were unable to test the real traffic mix the provider had on their production network.

Solution

With Mu Dynamics testing solution for next-gen firewalls, the provider was able to recreate their expected production application mixes, representing millions of users accessing thousands of applications across multiple platforms, to test the functionality and performance of their firewall prior to deployment.  They were also able to test how the firewall would handle security threats, including distributed denial of service attacks, known vulnerabilities that target network systems, and malformed application traffic.

Results

Mu Dynamics provided both breadth and depth, across multiple testing disciplines, to give the provider the confidence to deploy once the firewall passed the exhaustive test cycles. Benefits include:

• Broad application support – leverage thousands of ready-to-run tests
• Performance –recreate the traffic of millions of users, accessing thousands of different applications, to ensure the firewall can scale
• Unified and comprehensive security testing – access to best-of-breed distributed denial of service, known vulnerability, and fuzz testing capabilities
• Speed – the ability to keep pace with ever-evolving application mix and threat profiles.

• Ease of use –simple work flows, automated test cases, and customizable testing