Bivio Network Content Control System
A Cyber-Security Solution to Monitor, Control, and Block Unwanted Traffic
Managing today’s complex network infrastructure presents many challenges to network and security administrators. First, they must effectively manage the continued growth in bandwidth-consuming IP communications (such as general Internet/Website traffic, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file transfers, Skype™, Instant Messaging (IM), VoIP, and YouTube) traversing their networks. Furthermore, they must ensure that IP traffic moving across the network complies with various regulatory or organization-approved network communication policies. Finally, since this same traffic often contains policy-prohibited content as well as malicious data (such as viruses, worms, phishing and other malware), network administrators must minimize the impact of cyber security threats.
If left unchecked, overall network performance is reduced, content management and control is diminished and there is increased vulnerability to cyber security attacks.
Responding to these challenges, the Bivio NCCS is the industry's leading integrated policy-based monitoring, content control and traffic enforcement solution. The NCCS is a standalone networking system that enables customers to provide granular web filtering and traffic enforcement on a per-protocol, per-flow, and per-user basis, all without requiring interaction with external devices. Customers can easily deploy the Bivio NCCS to provide highly configurable traffic enforcement and web content control functionality to immediately protect and optimize their fixed and mobile network communications infrastructure.
Features & Benefits
The Bivio NCCS is a carrier-grade networking platform that utilizes advanced deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to deliver comprehensive network content control. Purpose-built for high-performance networks, the NCCS includes a rich set of functionality to identify, manage and control network traffic based on content, services, applications, protocols and users. Customers can easily deploy the Bivio NCCS to provide highly configurable traffic enforcement and web content control functionality to immediately protect and optimize their fixed and mobile network communications infrastructure.
- Carrier-grade system combines web filtering and traffic enforcement for comprehensive network policy enforcement and cyber threat mitigation
- Innovative FlowInspect™ DPI Engine - Industry leading flow-state technology manages the ‘state’ of each IP flow and performs real-time correlation between the different flows for accurate traffic identification
- Auto-learns users’ profiles by inspecting Radius packets for per-user policy enforcement, eliminating reliance on external provisioning servers
- High-performance web filtering delivers extensive coverage and accuracy
- Dynamic and uncategorized URL/URI analysis, including support of custom white list/black list
- VoIP signaling detection on a per call direction, per telephone number (E.164), and per ISP/IP-range basis for granular policy enforcement
- Ideal for both wireline and mobile deployments - Supports mobile IP communications and identification of network users
- Reduces network complexity with in-line, standalone deployments, eliminating reliance on proxy servers
FlowInspect™ DPI Engine - The Foundation for IP Traffic Monitoring & Control
At the core of the Bivio NCCS is a powerful and innovative deep packet inspection (DPI) engine, which leverages Bivio’s long and successful history of combining complex processing at very high networking speeds with unlimited flexibility. These technologies enable full protocol and user awareness, along with fine-grained application and content differentiation. In addition, the DPI engine is used to provide auto-discovery of user-authentication protocols, eliminating the need to make external calls to provisioning servers, thereby greatly simplifying the deployment and management of the system. The result is a unique and powerful system that can be deployed inline to perform packet inspection, web content control and traffic enforcement on a completely standalone basis.
Web Content Control with True HTTP Filtering
The Bivio NCCS provides an advanced Internet filtering solution that not only includes traditional URL filtering but also protects the network communications infrastructure from malware and other emerging threats. NCCS includes mechanisms to control access to improper content, peer-to-peer (P2P) and chat usage, and other Web-centric applications.
A significant shortcoming of traditional proxy-based URL filtering systems is that only the traffic routed to the proxy servers can be filtered (ports 80, 8080, 443, etc.). The Bivio NCCS uses Bivio’s advanced FlowInspect DPI Engine to filter HTTP traffic regardless of the port used by the service.
The Bivio NCCS web content control technology is based on a state-of-the-art URL categorization and content rating engine, supporting controlled access to any combination of over 50 website content categories, including many categories specific to sites optimized for viewing on wireless/mobile devices. With over 350 million URLs classified in over 20 languages, the Bivio NCCS provides coverage for the smallest regional to largest global deployments. Network administrators may also import custom whitelist and blacklist sites for specific enforcement concerns for comprehensive content control with fine-tuned precision.
Advanced features of NCCS include the ability to enforce policy based on the specific destination IP address, as well as supporting HTTP keyword matching and URI wildcards.
Traffic Enforcement for Today and the Future
With the rapid expansion of broadband applications, network providers are acutely aware that a significant amount of their network’s bandwidth is consumed by traffic such as P2P, VoIP, YouTube, and more. Besides consuming a huge amount of bandwidth, this traffic may often contain malicious or restricted content, such as security threats or confidential data. In some cases, administrators may find that some services are overwhelming the network infrastructure at particular times of the day and causing dissatisfaction among network users.
The Bivio NCCS, powered by Bivio’s advanced FlowInspect DPI Engine, provides full visibility and control of all users accessing the network, the types of traffic they can transmit and services they can access. Network administrators can use the NCCS to accurately identify and manage traffic flows based on specific applications, protocols and users.
As networking is very dynamic, one of the major challenges of network traffic enforcement is the ever-changing application and protocol signatures that are used to identify an application within a specific traffic flow. Bivio has overcome this challenge with a unique capability of the Bivio NCCS that addresses frequently changing protocol versions and enhancements. As new protocols and applications emerge, dynamic libraries on the NCCS are updated so that analysis and identification continues uninterrupted. Unclassified traffic flows are also managed to eliminate potential network threats.