In mid 2019, there was a massive data leak of users from a Chinese social network site called Weibo. It was estimated that the personal details of more than 538 million users were compromised.
2019 and the following year was marred by similar such incidents, which showed the world the importance of network security and put a spotlight on the best practices for managing organizational networks.
When it comes to network security, monitoring solutions play a significant role. Many monitoring solutions have helped organizations in monitoring their entire infrastructures and offered a smooth user experience.
Monitoring solutions help you see the performance of your network and identify the potential problems. Furthermore, it enables you to identify any anomalies and security threats. The monitoring solutions help you with real-time alerts before potential issues can cause any damage to the network.
In addition, the tools help you with detailed insights into network health, connected devices, CPU usage, etc.
Network monitoring is a crucial component of any business. It is important to ensure your network and data is always secured and accessible to staff. An effective monitoring allows an IT (Information Technology) admin to address the following questions:
- Are there any security breaches?
- Are there any rogue devices?
- Is your network being attacked by malware?
- Are there any disturbances?
- Are there any other issues?
- Are you backed up?
- Do you know your network’s performance?
- What about bandwidth?
Network monitoring ensures that you know what is always going on in your network. Without it, it is difficult to tell where you are at risk and what you need to work on.
Security Features for Network Monitoring Solutions
The security threats such as malware can create disturbance in the performance, and these breaches needed to be solved as fast as possible. Therefore, network monitoring solutions need to be prepared for these types of incidents. The security features vary from enterprise to enterprise, depending upon the complexity and demand.
However, any network monitoring tools should offer basic built-in security capabilities. Below are the six important security features you ensure your Network monitoring solution provides.
The Health of Network Traffic
The network always gets to witness all the communication taking place between all the connected devices. Therefore, it becomes mandatory to monitor the traffic across the network. This helps the organizations in discovering the potential errors before they cause any security threats.
Proactive Automation
With various monitoring solutions coming out in the market, advanced tools have automated the procedures. Certain protocols take place automatically when a breach invaded the network. Without any human intervention, it runs the programmed solutions to the accrued problems. This saves a lot of human time and money for your organization. Thus, time can be utilized to solve more critical issues as the employee does not need to respond and solve every problem.
Bandwidth Usage
The unusual use of bandwidth leads to several security attacks. A complete Monitoring solution provides insight into the bandwidth usage by an application, device, or even a transaction. This monitoring practice helps notifying the organization in case of abnormal traffic happens in the network.
Real-time Custom Alerts
It is a failure as a solution if the monitoring tool does not alert the organization as any problem occurs. The minimum reaction time to alert the IT team after discovering the potential error makes it difficult for the potential security attackers to cause any harm to the organization. These solutions ought to be integrated with innovative technologies like artificial intelligence to provide an advanced alerting system to enterprises. This makes it easy to focus on high priority and critical failures and set them on priority, and the minor alerts can be delayed.
Comprehensive Security
When it comes to monitoring the network, we try monitoring every aspect of the network. Making sure the security of the network is equally important. If the monitoring solution does not monitor every part of the network, it does not guarantee you the entire network’s security. Therefore, it is compulsory to provide comprehensive end-to-end security to the network against security breaches.
Unified Security Monitoring Solution
Monitoring the network and securing the same comes with many aspects to examine. The solution demands one unified dashboard from where every single metric and device can be monitored across the network. The add-on plugins can be installed in the system as per the organization’s structure and demands. It is essential to maintain complete visibility of the entire network while resolving security threats as well.
Key Takeaway
While monitoring the network helps you maintain the network’s health and traffic, it becomes mandatory to secure the network. Therefore, the advanced network monitoring solutions not only help you examine your organization’s entire network, connected devices, network health, and traffic, but it offer one comprehensive, unified solution to secure the same and save your organization and network from any potential security threats.
Learn more about network security solutions from Cisco official website.