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Arrow Electronics, Inc.

Arrow Quick Hit: Gigamon and PCI compliance

July 23, 2025 | Danny Crockett

July 23, 2025

What is it?

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of global standards that establishes a technical and operational baseline for protecting account data used in credit cards and payment transactions. The Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline is uniquely positioned in data networks to ensure PCI compliance with greater ease and accuracy. PCI has 12 major requirements, sometimes referred to as R1-R12. Gigamon provides the visibility to support compliance in 9 of these requirements, satisfying 25 PCI risk controls and does so in a manner that augments your existing security stack and helps bridge siloed groups.

Why should you care?

PCI DSS 4.0 requires monitoring, real-time insight and proactive control validation. A SIEM's visibility into PCI compliance parameters generally comes from syslog and EDR-reported data. Network derived telemetry can enrich existing sources and ease cost and friction to attain and report on compliance requirements. Some examples include:

Monitoring OT, IoT, BYOD Verifying appropriate levels of encryption
Observing TLS certs in use Detecting non-standard port usage
Monitor cipher sets in use Monitoring vulnerable ports and protocols
Detect rogue servers and services Observe lateral movement
Verify admin traffic is encrypted at the appropriate level Verify PCI and non-PCI networks are not communicating
Detect known and unknown apps such as BitTorrent, crypto mining, etc.  

Gigamon can also provide insights that are not PCI DSS mandated, but still potentially significant including:

  • Exposing Shadow IT (unsanctioned cloud storage, messaging apps, email accounts, etc.). These expand the vulnerability surface and introduce unknown risk.
  • Performance is not explicitly addressed by PCI DSS, but organizations that accept and process credit card transactions often have an SLO or SLA that the transaction must meet. 

How does it work?

Gigamon provides packet-level network visibility into north/south, east/west, encrypted, cloud, container and OT/IoT traffic flows. This is accomplished with a single consistent access mechanism that is fully integrated with and orchestrated across all the major public/private cloud platforms. Once inside the Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline, traffic may then be decrypted (including TLS 1.3), de-duplicated, and a full range of traffic and application intelligence leveraged to provide deep insights into network activity from deep packet inspection across your entire IT footprint. This network-derived intelligence and insight greatly enhance security posture when it is used to generate enriched metadata in a form that can be consumed directly by a SIEM. Simultaneously, this visibility can also be sent in the form of packets to tools that require them.

Integrating this deep network visibility into your existing security and operations stack eases operational friction and creates a faster, better and cheaper route to comprehensive PCI compliance.

Differentiation in the market

  • Gigamon invented packet broker technology over 20 years ago and in that time has maintained both market and technology leadership with over 150 patents.
  • Gigamon has a commanding lead in private/public cloud visibility and orchestration via GigaVUE Fabric Manager and GigaVUE Cloud Suite, automating the instantiating, configuring and monitoring of your hybrid infrastructure in support of DevOps, NetOps and SecOps teams. Extensive integrations with orchestration tools like Ansible, Terraform, Chef and Puppet, AWS CloudWatch, Azure Network Watch, VMware vCenter, Nutanix Prism, OpenStack Controller and others make the Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline ready to deploy across any modern compute environment. 
  • Only Gigamon provides network visibility within container nodes, cloud subnets, VMs and physical network infrastructure to your existing security, observability and monitoring tools. 
  • Where others provide simple export of L2-L4 flow data, Gigamom Application Intelligence uses deep packet inspection to export rich application metadata for over 4,000 apps and close to 6,000 metadata attributes. Modern export formats include JSON and Open Cybersecurity Schema Format (OCSF). 
  • Gigamon has by far the most extensive and modern capabilities for packet decryption, including TLS 1.3 and container traffic via their breakthrough Gigamon Precryption technology. 

How do you position and sell?

The Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline is a critical component of any tool set that requires or greatly benefits from network-derived intelligence in the form of packets, flows, or application metadata. This includes many cybersecurity, application performance management (APM) and network performance management (NPM) solutions. Any time you are speaking to customers or prospects about securing or optimizing their hybrid infrastructure, Gigamon should be introduced to make these tools more effective, simplifying and automating the customer's visibility architecture and operations, while providing significant cost savings — especially in virtual environments. 

Arrow's Gigamon team are here to help you grow your business and meet your customer's network observability needs. Our channel business managers are experts in the entire Gigamon product line and programs. Arrow can help you integrate Gigamon's capabilities with SIEMs like Splunk, QRadar and ArcSight, NDR/XDR solutions from Forescout, Palo Alto Networks, Netscout, Trend Micro, CrowdStrike and others, as well as NPM/APM solutions such as Riverbed. Our certified Gigamon engineers have years of experience in selling and supporting the entire Deep Observability Pipeline solution and stay on top of all the latest technical developments. Reach out to us today! 

To learn more about Gigamon and Arrow, visit our Better Together page. 

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Danny Crockett

Danny Crockett

Technical Solutions Architect

Danny joined the Arrow ECS Sales Engineering organization in 2022, and leverages over 20 years of IT operations experience in networking and security, as well as 12 years as a pre-sales SE. Danny is currently focused on channel partner enablement for Gigamon and Riverbed. He also enjoys interacting in a technical pre-sales capacity with internal Arrow teams and partner prospects on a range of cybersecurity and networking topics.
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