Page 104 - CDM-CYBER-DEFENSE-eMAGAZINE-December-2018

7 Network Security Tools to Protect Your Digital Assets from

Malicious Activity

by Jorge Alago, Cybersecurity Architecture Lead, Veristor

How can you protect your network from today’s elevated level of cyber threat activity? It’s a question that
many network administrators are asking. The first step is to understand the various network security
solutions available and how they can help.

Here are seven tools that will help you protect your digital assets without getting in the way of business
as well as some best-practices to consider to help identify the solutions that will elevate your security
posture.

1. Network Access Control (NAC) executes authentication for all end users and devices—both
wired and wireless. It’s critical to authenticate every user and every device that tries to connect to
your network, keeping in mind that most end users have more than one device, and some devices
are shared by multiple end users. If you use a tool that has open APIs, it can talk to multiple
devices from multiple vendors. Make sure the NAC can integrate easily with other security
solutions in your network, so it can pass along authentication to other devices and enable them
to become user-aware. For example, your NAC should talk to your firewalls so it can share
information such as the user’s IP address and the segments of the network the user is authorized
to access.

2. Next-Generation Firewalls have earned the “next-generation” designation because they can
incorporate multiple aspects of security, instead of just the basic, traditional firewall protection.
These tools go beyond blocking unauthorized end users based on IP addresses and enable you
to designate safe user groups and user names. You also benefit from intrusion protection and
detection, URL web filtering, and SSL traffic decryption/inspection. Next-generation firewalls are
also aware of who is crossing your firewall and what they have access to, and they can limit the
access of each user based on the information they receive from your NAC.

104