Everything You Need to Know About Production Network Security Software

Production networks are often the most vulnerable to cyber-attacks. They contain PII, intellectual property, and business strategies that support company functions.

Visibility is key to production network security. Improve your team’s ability to sift through countless alerts with security solutions prioritizing high-fidelity alerts and providing efficient visibility into encrypted traffic.

Visibility

A comprehensive network security strategy must include clear visibility. It is the first step in cyber situational awareness, and it helps you identify behaviours that don’t match your organization’s normal patterns (as defined by your firewall and other security tools).

Visibility requires ongoing maintenance as configurations change, machines and cloud services are added or deleted, and traffic flows shift. It also depends on your IT infrastructure and monitoring tools, which may have bandwidth and performance limitations.

If your monitoring tools are too busy getting overloaded by data they can’t parse, you’ll need help finding threats. A solution is a system that recognizes important trends, separates the unusual from the routine, and delivers those findings in a form you can digest. It reduces your time addressing false positives and speeds up how quickly you can detect and respond to an actual threat. It also lets you foresee future needs to expand or upgrade your network with planning. Gigamon’s Software Defined Visibility helps MSPs and channel partners create custom capabilities that accelerate security, reduce costs, and meet client service level agreements.

Detection

It is crucial to have Fortinet’s production network security software that can detect indicators of threats or anomalies in production environments. This software can prevent cyber criminals from entering the network and putting sensitive data and systems at risk of compromise.

To detect these attacks, a system like intrusion detection and prevention (IDS) software can monitor all communication between hosts on the network, including inside production environments. IDSs use signature matching methods to find a pattern previously identified as malicious and trigger an alert.

Unlike traditional SIEM, NTA, and EDR solutions, NIDS can monitor traffic across an entire production network rather than just one isolated segment. It provides a robust and comprehensive way to protect physical, virtual, and cloud networks with full visibility into all communication.

This approach, called continuous visibility, allows DevSecOps teams to validate their defenses by safely simulating attacks and exposing gaps in their security architecture. They can then deploy and scale a more effective security architecture that prevents breaches by eliminating blind spots. It will strengthen its production environment by eliminating vulnerabilities and providing full visibility into physical, virtual, and cloud network segments.

Response

The purpose of security is to prevent cyberattacks from impacting business operations. This is accomplished through both hardware and software that monitors, detects, identifies, analyzes, and mitigates threats at every level of your network. Network security also ensures that data is available only to those authorized to access it on demand.

Depending on the type of business, a cyberattack on the production network can cause serious financial consequences for companies. It includes lost revenue due to downtime, a compromised customer database, loss of intellectual property, and fines for violating data protection laws.

In addition, a cyberattack on a production network can deprive the organization of its ability to deliver products and services. It can have long-term implications on the company’s reputation, brand, and overall viability. To reduce these risks, businesses must deploy comprehensive security solutions that are easy to manage without sacrificing performance and provide a unified approach to protect physical, virtual, and cloud networks and their edge. This approach requires continuous visibility, granular access policies, continuous validation, and a zero-trust architecture.

Automation

Automated systems can help sift through the millions of alerts generated daily and prioritize the most critical threats to investigate and remediate. They can also perform automated response actions on behalf of security teams, dramatically reducing incident response times.

Quality automation tools can also alleviate strain on short-staffed teams, reduce burnout, and help them stay ahead of rapidly growing threat environments. This is particularly important for cybersecurity professionals responding to constantly changing, highly complex network environments.

A quality automation system provides a centralized interface that connects disparate security tools and data sources to orchestrate responses. It enables unified detection and investigation, leveraging telemetry and threat intelligence to automatically group and correlate related alerts into attack stories. Similarly, it allows automated responses to be executed at all hours without human intervention, enabling continuous operations and reducing mean time to resolution. Ultimately, automation can free up security analysts’ valuable time to focus on investigations requiring their skill and expertise. It can also empower them to take a proactive approach to security to eliminate human error and accelerate security posture improvement.

Reporting

In addition to the ability to detect and respond to threats, network security solutions should also provide reporting capabilities. These can be textual or graphical and help you manage your devices’ overall status, security, and health. Reports can be generated on demand or scheduled to be sent to recipients at specific intervals.

A production network security solution can help you protect your business from cyber-attacks by providing visibility into your environment, detecting and responding to malware, and preventing network threats from spreading across your production infrastructure. It can also help you improve productivity and reduce overhead expenses by reducing downtime caused by malicious users, viruses, or other network threats.

Most EPP solutions include an endpoint detection and response (EDR) component that identifies advanced threats, including polymorphic attacks, fileless malware, zero-day attacks, and other anomalies in your production environments. Depending on your business needs, many of these solutions can be deployed on-premises or in a cloud-based model. Some may require an on-premises deployment due to compliance rules.