Network security management challenges and best practices

What is effective network security management?

A solid network defense underpins every productive and healthy enterprise network. This defense strategy involves mapping the right security policies, tools, processes and practices to an organization's operational objectives.

Enterprises must be mindful of government regulations and corporation mandates. They must also ensure data integrity, security and the availability of their infrastructures. However, no enterprise can afford to lock down its environment completely at the expense of productivity.

To that end, effective enterprise security taps into essential technologies, such as the following:

• Firewalls.
• VPNs.
• Intrusion detection systems.
• Multifactor authentication (MFA).
• Identity and access management.
• Security information and event management.
• Unified threat management.
• DoS mitigation and incident response services.

Analytics and AI further improve the efficacy of many of these tools.

Challenges with network security management

Given a company's absolute reliance on the network for critical operations, securing the infrastructure is a top priority. The following challenges, however, can make it complicated for network security engineers to protect network assets:

• Enterprise networks are highly distributed and virtual.
• Lack of observability.
• Network security controls sometimes impede infrastructure performance and hamper the end-user experience.
• They need to integrate security data from disparate sources to protect what are most often hybrid environments.

Network security tools are continually improving, but certain issues still force network security engineers to scramble as they try to stay ahead of threats. It can be vexing to obtain an accurate end-to-end perspective of network activity from disparate sources, particularly in hybrid cloud environments. Even in products that supposedly have close correlation, true integration is often missing.

Organizations have found some success in quick and accurate threat identification, but the overwhelming volume of threats continues to undermine progress. According to the 2024 IBM Data Breach Report, the average time to spot and mitigate a breach is 258 days. Yet, that's an improvement over the prior year by 19 days and is a new seven-year low.

Keep networks secure with restricted access

In recent years, observability surface has become a significant tool to assess network security. Network administrators also benefit from threat management products that use machine learning, which accelerates threat identification and elevates the accuracy of the intelligence it obtains from network and application management apps. There has also been a push to integrate security controls into network devices, driven in part by developments such as secure access service edge.

Zero-trust architecture has also risen in prominence, thanks in part to a U.S. federal mandate requiring all agencies to deploy specific zero-trust controls by the end of 2024. This framework assumes no device or person accessing network assets is permitted access until authentication and authorization takes place.

Zero trust applies many protective measures, among them granular authentication, which considers the following factors before allowing any entity to access the network:

• User identity.
• Device type.
• Activity.
• Query.
• Location.

Zero trust also applies ongoing authentication and tracking to monitor users and devices. This ensures they have not been imperiled.

Network managers can also use segmentation to limit network access and prevent lateral movement. Organizations can choose to implement least-privilege access, which applies MFA and granular microsegmentation to further control access to enterprise resources.

Effective network security management best practices

The best network security technology has limited value without the right policies and practices to execute controls. IT teams and end users must be aware of what protections are in place and how to use them successfully.

This starts with proper training. All employees and contractors should understand corporate IT security policies and how to use available tools. Policy development and continuous review is a crucial foundational element. Ongoing end-user training and education -- not just an annual training session or quiz -- is a must.

Other fundamental best practices include the following:

• Deploy multilayered security with support and countermeasures. This limits lateral access and protects the most critical resources.
• Have an effective networking monitoring service in place.
• Regularly update both software and hardware. Change factory hardware settings when deploying new equipment.
• Automate software patching but manually intervene when necessary.
• Perform vulnerability assessments on a consistent basis. Conduct interim testing between audits.
• Apply MFA and other access controls.
• Implement network segregation.
• Develop and deploy a zero-trust architecture that relies on continuous verification.
• Define an incident response plan that applies automation when possible.
• Take steps to prevent insider theft or data loss.
• Recognize what baseline network activity looks like.
• Proactively test systems to uncover vulnerabilities and poor configuration.

Effective network security management starts and ends with the human element. Organizations must understand this and ensure the right practices and processes are in place. Unfortunately, in an era when attracting and retaining the right personnel is a constant challenge, it can be difficult to establish a reliable cybersecurity environment.

Amy Larsen DeCarlo has covered the IT industry for more than 30 years, as a journalist, editor and analyst. As a principal analyst at GlobalData, she covers managed security and cloud services.