Building a Strong Network Security Architecture
Network security architecture comes with many definitions, but at its core, it’s a set of security methods, models, and principles that align with the needs and objectives of your company. A proper cybersecurity architecture keeps your organization safe from cyber threats.
When appropriately executed, a security architecture will successfully meet the unique needs of your business and the security threats it faces.
Building a solid network security architecture should happen in phases. This post explains the steps for constructing a network security architecture to defend your network’s data and valuable IT assets.
Contents:
- Building a strong network security architecture
- How Domotz helps with Network security architecture and CIS controls
- The Phases of a Network Security Architecture
- The Characteristics of a Network Security Architecture
Building a Strong Network Security Architecture
Building a solid network relies heavily on understanding your company’s needs. Once you’ve identified those, you can launch into the four phases of building a network security architecture, beginning with risk assessment and concluding with operations and monitoring.
The best security architectures come from existing ones, so don’t hesitate to study what others (competitors included) have done to launch their enterprises. Your network security architecture will combine seamlessly with clear communications and expectations, establishing comprehensive, reliable, and effective protections for your business reputation and assets.
How Domotz can help with Network Security Architecture and CIS controls
Domotz network monitoring system can help with your network security architecture and implementing CIS controls, which are the basis for many security frameworks.
Inventory and Control of Enterprise Assets
Many service providers stop at the end-points (PCs, Laptops, Servers) and possibly the network infrastructure. In contrast, every device that is on the network should be managed.
Domotz, using our advanced scanning techniques, will discover every device, by MAC address, associated with the networks you are monitoring. Domotz will even discover when a single, physical device has more than one MAC address associated with it, as is often the case with servers and virtual machines. Read more about the automated device attribute discovery feature.
Secure Configuration of Enterprise Assets and Software
Utilizing Domotz, you can easily maintain a secure configuration process for your network infrastructure, which is a safeguard recommended in the CIS control. It is up to you and your implementation to ensure the integrity of that infrastructure, but with Domotz, you can easily see and be alerted to changes to the network. Furthermore, your managed switch and firewall configurations are backed up in the Domotz cloud, making it easy to save and restore systems as needed.
Continuous Vulnerability Management
To minimize risks, you should know all the assets associated with your network and when new devices show up on the network. Domotz will immediately recognize assets on your network. Then we’ll scan for TCP ports, which can be associated with potential vulnerabilities. While your SCAP tool will do a thorough job of highlighting potential Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), you should know immediately when a device with open ports is on the network.
Network Infrastructure Management
As a network monitoring tool, Domotz is agnostic to the hardware you use for your network infrastructure. This is important for your business, but as a managed service provider, you may rely on multiple vendors and their equipment to build systems that meet your client’s needs. Having a tool like Domotz to manage and maintain the network infrastructure of all your clients is extremely important and valuable. Domotz helps keep all your clients’ systems managed and as clean as your process will allow for, based on your cyber-hygiene practices.
Network Monitoring and Defense
You can leverage Domotz network discovery to understand when new devices appear on the network. Gaining Immediate awareness of new devices is a critical first step that is often overlooked in terms of network security process and design.
Service Provider Management
In today’s world, your Internet service provider is just as important as water, sewer, and electricity running your business. Domotz automatically checks your Internet service provider on a regular basis, by doing speed checks across the internet and reporting on outages. Furthermore, you can set up Domotz for Latency testing between external hosts/services that you may be relying on.
The Phases of a Network Security Architecture
There are plenty of ways to build a network security framework. Here are some of the most important phases to consider when building your organization’s framework.
Assessing Your Risk
Firstly, in this initial phase, you should evaluate your business and the odds of a potential attack. Additionally, consider the influence of your company’s vital assets and the possible effects of security threats and vulnerabilities. Moreover, you must understand where you are to know where you are going.
Use a comprehensive risk assessment to get an overview of where your business stands in terms of potential cybersecurity threats. A thorough risk assessment is crucial because it’s impossible to improve practices if you’re unaware of the problems.
Determine your CIS Control Group
The Center for Internet Security published version eight (v8) of its security controls. The first step in adopting processes is determining which CIS control group you are in. There are 3 implementation groups and determining which one you fit in will help you determine which policies, controls, and practices apply most to your business. Learn more about v8 CIS controls.
Design
When the risk assessment phase is complete, you’ll begin designing the security services you need to enable your business risk objectives. In addition, this design is the roadmap you need to understand the measures required for the best protection possible.
Implementation
Once the plan is in place, the implementation part of the process can begin. Next security processes and services are implemented, operated, and controlled.
Design assurance services to ensure your new security standards and policies work in real-time business situations. It’s common to do another risk assessment at this phase to ensure that your newly enforced network security framework addresses the concerns of the first phase.
Operations and Monitoring
The final phase of building a network security architecture deals with the everyday processes of your business, including managing your threat and vulnerability levels. This is the phase in which you’ll take measures to supervise the operational state of your network.
As you may have guessed, the operations and monitoring phase of the network security strategy is continuous. You will consistently work with internal teams. This is to ensure that all security measures are upheld and monitored appropriately.
The Characteristics of a Network Security Architecture
You should include essential qualities and components to make your security architecture run smoothly and effectively. Building a security network to protect your data is relatively useless if poorly executed.
Comprehensiveness of your network security architecture
A complete picture of the network such as that provided by Domotz, including user experiences, is the contextual information that you need in place with a comprehensive cybersecurity architecture.
The security products you utilize should provide you with a complete understanding of network activity. This includes the segments that are not fully controlled or owned by your organization. For example, security measures that operate on the cloud.
Complete Connection
The products in your security infrastructure should connect on a certain level. The connection of your products falls in line with network comprehensiveness. If you don’t have a connected network security architecture built, you’re missing out. You’ll miss security coverage in the business aspects where security products don’t connect.
Continuous Analysis of your network security architecture
Even with the best security network and products, continuous analysis is essential to business survival. Organizations still take far too long to realize a security breach has taken place, which is why it’s critical to improve and understand the strength of your network security framework.
In short, hindsight is 20/20, but you don’t want to look back on a security failure knowing that you could have avoided it with proper security analysis.
There’s no denying that locating sophisticated security threats isn’t easy. However, it’s not impossible. Approaching system network security through updated and modern threat intelligence, with the help of historical network traffic and packet data, can help you discover threats you previously missed.
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