Network Security
What is Network Security?
Network security is a collective term for a set of features and best practices that offer protection against unauthorized access to data or abuse of the important infrastructure layers of network.
Network security requires both hardware and software. Secure networks ideally have multiple overlapping security layers, for example up-to-date antivirus, granular access controls, redundancy through distributed services, multiple firewalls, controlled physical access, and strong internal and external policies.
Importance of Network Security
Organizations gather lots of data, both anonymized and identifiable, but always sensitive. These can include business records, personal details, aggregated data, or other information useful for business transactions and intelligence. Compromised network access poses a security threat that can expose both valuable business data and personal information. As networks are critical infrastructure to not only businesses but also government infrastructure and society, many legislative data security provisions such as HIPPA or FEPRA has been established. In addition to legal frameworks, organizations must also establish strong internal policies and procedures.
Benefits of network security
Increase Trust
Network security boosts customer trust and defends the company from the reputational and legal implications of a lack of security.
Reduce Risk
Correctly implemented network security allows your company to remain consistent and minimize the business and financial effect of a violation, if it happens.
Protect Data
The security of the network ensures the security of the data running through it.
Enable Modern Workplace
Network security protects the infrastructure of future work, such as IoT, BYOD, and Work-From-Home practices.
How does Network Security work?
Network security is a concerted, continuous process to protect data and infrastructure. For network security to be efficient, all its components need to operate efficiently on their own, and the overlapping nature of their design and deployment strenghtens each further.
An often overlooked part of network security is efficient network management. Proper visibility and removing bottlenecks in the infrastructure that are viable for becoming vulnerable, organizations can create a strong foundations for other security implementations.
Components of Network Security
Here are four key concepts of network security that can, working together, protect your network:
Access Control: administrators need to consider and monitor who can and cannot access the network. Access controls define what network users and equipment are approved, and what data and infrastructure they have access to. Several traditional and modern access control features and processes exist, both software, hardware, or procedure-based. Compliance analytical methods to detect suspicious patterns on a network are a new technique that can help network operators track anomalous traffic in their networks. After deployment, alerts are sent to the responsible parties any time an abnormal behavior has been observed.
- Firewall: a firewall is a network security software that controls the inbound traffic and filters it before reaching the network. The protection of the firewall can restrict or authorize network traffic based on a variety of rules (such as type, origin, destination, etc.). There are various firewall implementations, on various levels of the network topology, enabling security personnel to configure multiple layers of protection.
- Intrusion prevention systems: also known as IPS, it is a vulnerability prevention method that investigates, detects, and avoids network traffic that’d leverage certain flaws, such as harmful inputs, aim requests or facilities, in order to gain influence or damage an app. Applied to all data flowing through the network, IPS constantly analyses and takes automatic actions.
- Security Information and Event Management: SIEM is a security management methodology that incorporates the control of safety incidents and safety knowledge into one composite security framework. In order to detect deviations and implement acceptable measures, SIEM collects the necessary and applicable data from different sources.
