5 Ways Your Business Can Optimize Its Network Security

With the rise in security breaches and harmful actors trying to gain access to business networks, companies can’t just rely on network security tools to protect their data. Your enterprise needs to have the right strategies in place to ensure your network security is as optimized as can be. That’s why we’ve compiled this list of five ways your business can optimize its network security and keep your essential and critical information safe and secure.

If you’re looking for resources to help evaluate network security and monitoring solutions to help optimize your network security, our free Network Monitoring Buyer’s Guide has you covered. It contains profiles on the top network monitoring providers in the market today, including descriptions of the tools they offer and noteworthy features of each. The guide also features 10 questions you should ask prospective vendors and yourself before buying a network monitoring solution. You can check out that guide here. We also offer a buyer’s guide for free and open source network monitoring tools if you’re a small business or have a tighter budget but still want enterprise-grade monitoring for business networks. Download this guide here.

Set up real-time alerts

Your company needs to be able to discover security problems in real-time (or as close to it as possible) in order to fix issues quicker. Most modern network monitoring tools feature real-time network alerting capabilities, informing your IT team about every issue that it encounters as soon as it’s discovered. That way, your company can counterattack security threats before they blossom into something problematic.

Add access control regulations

Access control regulations are crucial for companies that allow a multitude of users to access sensitive data. If your business allows external users to download data and files from your infrastructure onto their local machines, you want to ensure that only publicly available resources can be accessed from the outside. Even within its infrastructure, an enterprise should set role-based access regulations to ensure that only the proper employees are accessing specific data.

Establish automated remediation, if available

An increasing number of network monitoring solutions are implementing automated remediation for security threats that invade a network. They can automatically apply potential fixes to solve the issue without human intervention. This could potential save time for your business, since your enterprise won’t have to respond to every single issue that props up, letting them focus on more pressing security problems.

Make sure your employees are properly trained

Employees using your network can introduce security threats if they don’t utilize it safely. If an employee on your network accesses an unprotected or malware-infested website, that could introduce a host of issues to your network and spread everywhere. In addition to the right network security tools, your company should also educate its workers on basic network security practices. This could include keeping company network usage for business tasks only to awareness on what malicious attacks (like phishing scams) typically look like.

Change your default network device passwords

If your network team isn’t in the habit of changing the default passwords of devices it onboards, then it needs to break this habit immediately. After installing a new device onto your network, the first order of business should be to change the device’s default password. This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s a vital step in securing the network. Every device should have its own unique password (and preferably, other authentication methods as well) to make it harder for users to access them.

Looking for a solution to help you improve your network performance? Our Network Monitoring Buyer’s Guide contains profiles on the top network performance monitor vendors, as well as questions you should ask providers and yourself before buying.

Check us out on Twitter for the latest in Network Monitoring news and developments!