Network security must be at the top priority due to the reports of devastating breaches that make headlines and make their way to boardroom conversations. Data manipulation and theft can be expensive and have negative ramifications on the business & its leadership. Thus, having network security protections becomes quite important to stave off these threats.
The most effective approach will be to leverage the Managed IT services that will provide complete cybersecurity solutions. In today’s post, we are going to explore six ways how to improve network security. Let’s check them out in detail below:
6 Ways to Improve Network Security
1. Evaluate and Compare
Integrating older hardware-based security devices into a network can be very challenging. Besides, it increases OPEX and CAPEX. On the other hand, software-based solution efficiently secures your server and network, protects important data, enforces integrity, and confidentiality, scales for accessibility, and alleviates breach risk.
2. Use Robust Firewall
When it comes to network security, having a strong firewall serves as a first defense line against any kind of cyber threat. A firewall acts as one important barrier between the internal network and the internet, thus enforcing network security rules for both inbound and outbound traffic.
It becomes important to upgrade your firewall to meet your security standards, thus ensuring it is configured properly will enhance the network’s security. Firewalls will prevent unauthorized access, block malicious software, and offer a complete log of the attempted attacks, helping thus you to know the nature of threats that your network faces.
3. Go for Cyber Threat Assessment
Cyber threat assessment done by the professional becomes yet another important way to improve network security. This assessment can give you complete knowledge of your network security’s current state as well as help to identify any kind of vulnerabilities that have to be addressed instantly.
4. Train Your Staff
Another effective way to improve network security is educating your staff on healthy security practices. Most of the cyber-attacks and data breaches begin with one single and insecure employee action. You need to regularly carry out security awareness training yearly to refresh the best practices.
Some of the topics such as recognizing phone calls and phishing emails, reporting security incidents, guarding credentials, and following safe access policies. Offer scenarios that will help the employees to identify social engineering methods. You can also train them on new security systems and tools getting deployed.
5. Backup Your Data to Cloud
Cloud backup is highly affordable, widely available, and simple to implement compared to traditional backups. Besides servers can also be backed to the cloud and even the user’s workstation & laptop data. There are a lot of reasons to data backup: data corruption, theft, protecting intellectual property, and business continuity.
Backup clients are quite simple to deploy and function in the background quietly. It’s important to mention, though this particular field has significantly matured, one drawback seen is some of the providers have restore times, which are much slower than desired.
6. Encrypt Your Whole Network
Encrypting your network is possible. One of the options is IPsec. Windows Server will function as IPsec server, whereas Windows supports its client capabilities natively. However, the encryption procedure will be an important overhead strain on your network, thus resulting in significant drops in an effective throughput rates. Besides, there are many proprietary network encryptions accessible from the network providers, most of which use Layer 2 method instead of Layer 3 techniques such as IPsec to decrease latency and overhead.
Virtual private networks or VPN’s, are mainly used to improve internet privacy. VPNs encrypt the data and make it tough for the hacker to know your online activity or where you are located. VPN’s security flows over the router, thus even if the router’s encryption gets hacked, still you have VPN encryption that will make the data unreadable.
Consequences of the Network Breaches
Security breaches in your network will have huge consequences for your business, which includes:
- Damage to reputation. The breach will damage your company’s reputation as well as make it tough to regain your customers and stakeholders trust.
- Loss of Data. Network security breach will result in loss of the sensitive data, like customer information and financial records.
- Improved costs. Breaches can lead to higher costs, like hiring new staff and upgrading your security systems.
- Revenue loss. In a few cases, network security breach will lead to your loss in revenue since customers will take their business somewhere else.
Final Thoughts
To conclude, network security is very important for any organization using computer networks and the internet. The above steps reviewed can go a very long way to strengthen your security. Make your network security the top priority and habit by practicing the steps consistently.
Just stay vigilant about any new threats and methods to protect your devices and data. With the right and timely measures and a safety mindset, you will significantly lower your network’s vulnerabilities & exposure to cyberattacks. Enhance and maintain your security as new risks emerge in protecting your sensitive information and data.