While coffeehouses in Europe have been around since the 1500s, the coffee pot was invented in 1806 with a metal sieve to strain away the grounds.

It took another 166 years for the Mr. Coffee® brand to invent the first automatic drip coffeemaker and its disposable filter that provided convenience, affordability and a reason for every household to stock up on Folgers.

That was a year after the first Starbucks coffeehouse opened its doors in 1971.

And the rest is history. Starbucks is now on every corner and it is hard to imagine a world without a triple grande sugar free vanilla latte.

The revolution can be seen just as clearly when we look at the world of PCs. But, not many industries have changed as quickly or dramatically. Just look at the past 20 years—computers used to take up an enormous amount of space. But, today netbooks and Apples new iPad are smaller than a spiral-bound notebook. What will the next 20 years bring? The race for faster, smaller computers with unthinkable amounts of memory will definitely continue with fierce competition targeting organizations and consumers alike.

One way computers have changed dramatically is … speed. The “father of supercomputing” Seymour Cray created a supercomputer in 1964 that performed up to three million instructions per second, a processing speed that was three times faster than that of its closest competitor, IBM.

By today’s standards, that is an extremely slow computer network. So, as phones get smarter, computer networks get faster and companies stretch beyond borders, what does it mean for network security?

To keep up with the vast amount of data and information on a company’s network, many IT departments are working to upgrade their 1G networks to 10G and beyond. Today, security professionals are challenged to keep pace with the increasing speed of their networks, especially when it comes to finding the source of an attack when such vast amounts of data are crossing the network at such speeds. The ability to capture, index and store all of the traffic on a full 10G network is extremely important for companies who have moved beyond just trying to prevent a security breach.

Yet, most organizations don’t realize that they can indeed capture, record, index, search, and retrieve any network data at ultra-fast 10Gb network speeds. They still feel restricted by slow technologies that take hours, days, even weeks to retrieve recorded data. The result? Many have given up and consigned themselves to just looking at metadata and hoping they’re protected by their signature-based security tools. They are not recording their network traffic 24/7/365 because they still think it is an impossible task. So when attacks like “Operation Aurora” occur, they have little knowledge of whether their network has been a target, and the extent of the attack.

It is time for organizations to realize that network forensics solutions have been revolutionized to keep up with the speed of today’s networks. It is not a vision of the future—It is here and now.

The Solera DS Appliance captures a company’s comprehensive stream of network traffic, full packet header and payload, indexes those packets into easy-to-search and access flows for replay and artifact reconstruction. So what’s the advantage of speed? Well, you can only analyze and uncover what you have recorded. If you didn’t record it, you don’t have the evidence. Active network forensics that can accommodate today’s network speeds enables real-time analysis without any network impact. It is vital to simply replay a suspected security incident within seconds or minutes, not days or weeks, to quickly identify the source and scope of the attack. To our customers, speed matters. Speeds that today seem beyond comprehension to some will be the norm of the future—and it will be here faster than you think.

So, what’s the best part of waking up? It’s not Folgers, It’s knowing that when your company is the target of an attack, you will be able to swiftly identify and remediate the breach, and protect the organization from further exposure – all prior to your morning coffee break.