Ask the Expert Series: What Are SPANs and Taps?

"Tap if you can, SPAN if you must."

If you've ever wondered why that piece of advice is fairly common among IT and security professionals, we have answers in the first of our "Ask the Expert" video series.

In fewer than 10 minutes, ExtraHop Senior Sales Engineer Josh Snow and Ixia Senior Systems Engineer Hans Hohenner will walk you through the pros and cons of using SPAN port mirroring and physical network taps. Josh and Hans will explain why both methods of copying network traffic are useful in certain circumstances, and they'll give you the reasons why a physical network tap offers a more reliable traffic feed than you would get with a SPAN at less operational cost over a longer period of time.

Josh and Hans will also offer some insight into why combining ExtraHop Reveal(x) and Reveal(x) Cloud with Ixia network visibility solutions delivers efficient access to the packet-level network and cloud traffic visibility needed for fast, accurate analysis of security incidents and performance issues.

By combining the richest on-premises and cloud inputs—data from network traffic—ExtraHop and Ixia provide complete visibility and definitive insight across your entire hybrid enterprise to help SecOps automatically detect and investigate threats and enable IT Ops to get to the root cause of performance problems instantly.

Because ExtraHop Reveal(x) and Reveal(x) Cloud give SecOps and IT Ops a unified view of everything happening on the network from a single user interface, our cloud-native network detection and response (NDR) solutions help break down organizational silos and reduce tool sprawl.

Learn more about how ExtraHop and Ixia are helping customers collaborate across security and IT teams in this blog from Ixia's VP of Product Management, Scott Register.