Network Security: Essentials, Choices, Key Players

Govind Jha Comparison | Buying Guide | Product Review | Firewall
12/19/2022 10:42am 10 minute read

This review will briefly explain network security, review essential cyber security options, and discuss top vendors who provide those options.

Network security is now even more critical than before. The world has seen enough chaos in the tech industry since the 2019 Covid pandemic, such as the notable rise in data breaches and cyber-attacks in the form of Ransomware and Phishing scams. Also, the impacts were critical and devastating. As the demand and necessity for working from home rose, attacks increased significantly, targeting all types of businesses.

Cybercrime is on the rise, and all network devices can be vulnerable in some way. The threat landscape is expanding at a rapid pace, and security teams are struggling to keep up with the latest threats, cybersecurity frameworks, mitigation techniques, and response strategies. Lack of security in the network layer adds to these difficulties.

Enterprise businesses, whether small or large, know the priority of network security management and are acting to protect their assets from the ever-evolving threat landscape. Regardless of business scale and sector, companies are just a hit away from being victims of the next significant cyber-attack. Identifying and understanding the importance of effective network security management is the need of the hour.

The saying "security is as strong as the weakest link in the system" suits network and infrastructure security well. Network security is a crucial factor when designing any IT infrastructure. The primary concern is guarding networks against all potential threats and data breaches. Securing the network frame with the necessary technology and up-to-date solutions is essential to protecting organizational data and assets. Before we dig further into network security elements, let's first understand what network security is.

What is network security?

The security firm EC-COUNCIL defines network security as a set of rules and configurations designed to protect computer networks' identity, integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility. Along with rules and configuration, other crucial technological components that define network security include software, network and security appliances, defense systems, and strategies.

Due to a lack of security at the network level, businesses are facing massive losses because attackers are easily snicking into one's internal network without any hassle. Hackers leverage the opportunity of an insecure perimeter network, and they access sensitive data and assets. Network security appliances typically operate in layers 3 and 4 of the OSI model, which are the Network and Transport layers. Network security acts as a gateway for internal and external traffic from inside or outside the organization.

NGFW Firewall

A network firewall is considered the first line of defense in network management and security. Implementing and adopting a next-generation firewall in the IT infrastructure is the first step toward network security against data breaches and cyber-attacks.

Network firewalls protect internal resources and data from outside intruders and threats. A firewall is a network security appliance designed to prevent unauthorized access and protect the IT infrastructure. A firewall also allows and denies traffic based on its rules, policies, and packet filtering procedures.

Firewalls can be implemented as hardware or software. We use network firewalls to prevent an unauthorized internet user from accessing a private network connected to the internet.

Traditional firewalls are used to pass network traffic based on the network ports. If the port is in the allow list, the packet will be allowed; if the port is blocked or restricted, the traffic will be dropped. Due to this limitation, the perimeter network wasn't as secure as it should be.

Next-generation firewalls come with IPS, DPI, and SSL decryption capabilities to proactively inspect the overall traffic and ethernet packets for any hidden malicious payloads. This feature prevents data breaches and attacks. Securing the gateway perimeter with a next-generation firewall helps prevent attacks and implement better access control policies, web control, and application control.

Moreover, as the world moves towards cloud technology, security companies now offer next-generation firewalls and SASE capabilities in multi-vendor cloud platforms. The different types of firewalls are Network Firewalls, Web Application Firewalls (WAF), Stateful Firewalls, and Proxy Firewalls.

Top Vendors

Paloalto Networks (Click to Shop Now)
Checkpoint Software
FortiGate (Click to Shop Now)
Cisco (Click to Shop Now)
Juniper (Click to Shop Now)

IPS

As the name suggests, an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) prevents unauthorized access to network systems. IPS can be combined with network firewalls or deployed as a standalone device. Although next-generation firewalls possess the IPS capabilities to avoid intruders and automated attacks, it is always a best practice to keep dedicated IPS and IDS technologies to prevent unauthorized access and various attacks.

Unlike firewalls, IPS technology monitors the network traffic against potential threats and malicious behavior using a signature-based mechanism. These signatures are constantly updated in the back-end database. When traffic matches these existing negative or unusual network traffic patterns, it immediately drops the traffic, blocks the source, and triggers an alarm based on the severity level.

So, how does it determine whether the traffic is malicious? When an ethernet packet enters the network, the IPS system constantly analyzes the behavior and activity of that ethernet packet. Suppose the packet shows unexpected behavior, tries to execute some command, or tries to communicate with a remote server. In that case, the IPS takes a series of actions to stop, block, or alert the security teams. An Intrusion Prevention System is an essential element of a network system. An IPS is a must-have solution for organizations with critical infrastructure. IPS implementation is a practical step toward network security management.

Top Choices

NAC

Network Access Control (NAC) is another essential element of a sound network security management strategy. NAC offers granular security control among end users and applications. It provides network traffic visibility and secure access management. It consists of various policies and rules that define the privileges and authorization capabilities for users to access multiple systems, components, and data inside an organization.

One of the essential features of NAC is that it allows network administrators to define policies and procedures that enable compliant and authenticated endpoint devices to access internal resources, sensitive data, and other critical systems in the network infrastructure. Moreover, NAC appliance in the infrastructure can define user roles and their capacities, such as who can do what on which system or network. NAC can also be used for network security analysis by inspecting network traffic at a glance. When NAC encounters a non-compliant device or traffic, it can block, restrict, or put them in quarantine based on the defined rules and procedures.

Organizations must adopt the NAC solution for better network security analysis and control. NAC is quite an essential component in network security management, especially in the current era where the workforce is hybrid and flexible. The NAC technology can help network admins better grasp network traffic visibility and access management to secure their network infrastructure.

Top Choices

DDOS Protection & Mitigation

A denial-of-service attack disrupts the smoothly running system services and resources to suddenly stop working and respond when this attack is launched on a target host. All an attacker needs to do is overwhelm a system or resource with a massive number of requests so that other requests made by legitimate users cannot be processed or responded to by that system. DDOS attacks can cripple organizations and shut them down from providing regular services, resulting in losses in business, reputation, and market value. Implementing a DDOS protection and mitigation solution is a must, especially for enterprise businesses, to prevent these attacks, protect critical assets and services, and support business continuity.

The DDOS protection and mitigation technologies predefine a set of rules and policies for specific hosts, applications, or devices to handle and process a limited number of requests per second. If the limit exceeds, the traffic can be manually blocked, or action can be taken according to the preconfigured rule or settings. DDOS mitigation solutions also alarm security teams when a threshold value is reached or exceeded, meaning there might be suspicious traffic or requests. These solutions use IP reputation lists, DPI, blocklisting, rate limiting, and mitigating active attacks.

DDOS protection and mitigation solutions are essential for securing networks. Organizations with extensive infrastructure spread across the nation or globally, like Telecom companies, MNCs, ISPs, and data centers, always deal with vast data. These giant corporations process millions of requests every second to provide better and uninterrupted services to general users.

Top Choices

Akamai
Netscout
Radware

SIEM

SIEM (Security information and event management) combines security information management (SIM) and security event management. It enables security analysts to monitor real-time security events proactively and analyze traffic and logs to discover or predict threats based on security alerts.

SIEM is a security solution that prevents threats and cyber-attacks before they disrupt business continuity by analyzing security events and logs. SIEM is also helpful in keeping track of security events for archive and auditing purposes. Businesses use SIEM solutions to be aware of potential threats and attacks and to prevent them. SIEM is a must-have solution for enterprise businesses dealing with sensitive data, applications, and crucial systems.

SIEM is a critical solution that protects organizational data and digital assets from the latest threat landscape and attack vectors. Security firms have introduced AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning) capabilities to easily monitor, detect, and prevent threats.

SIEM can also be used for log management and meeting compliance needs.

Most SIEM solutions aggregate and consolidate the data to recognize and detect cyber threats. SIEM collects event and security data from various sources and technologies present in the network like Firewalls, Anti-virus, users, applications, and cloud environments.

Implementing a well-known SIEM solution from top security companies like IBM and Crowdstrike is always advantageous. Training existing employees and recruiting expert security analysts for SEIM solutions is one crucial step toward network security analysis and network security management.

Top Choices

The Road Ahead

No "One for All" solution exists, especially in the network security domain. Network firewalls alone cannot prevent threats and cyber-attacks. Today's hybrid infrastructure and workforce require a mix of security technology and solutions to keep up with the ever-changing security industry and threat landscape. Organizations can leverage hybrid security solutions that would help them strengthen their organization's security posture. Hybrid security solutions for both on-premise and cloud environments help enterprises meet their business objectives and compliance standards.

We have emerging technology like SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) for a cloud environment that empowers businesses to have next-generation firewall capabilities, cloud security brokers, and SWG (Secure Web Gateway) in the cloud technology platform. Implementing the SASE solution in the network architecture helps organizations achieve ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access) goals for more secure access and granular control.

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