What is Network Security Management?
Network security management allows an administrator to control a network of physical and virtual firewalls from one central location. To gain powerful visibility into network behavior, automate device configurations, enforce global policies, view firewall traffic, generate reports, and provide a single management interface for physical and virtual systems, administrators need network total security managment solutions.
Problems Solved by Network Security Management
In today’s complex network architecture and in an ever-changing threat environment, IT professionals find it difficult to keep security at an effective level. Administrative security tasks include maintaining an ever-expanding table of users, devices, locations, and uses. Compliance. Provision of new services, access controls and security mechanisms. Performance optimization. troubleshooting on request. Any misconfiguration can leave the network vulnerable to advanced threats and lead to compliance violations.
To address these issues, network administrators need to deploy security policies across the network. However, the network infrastructure can contain thousands of firewall policies that have accumulated over the years. Such rules are often disorderly, duplicate, outdated, or conflict with new rules, which inadvertently impact network performance and security.
The following illustration shows the network security management tasks that IT professionals perform in a typical enterprise.
Network security management helps reduce manual tasks and human error. To do this, the management process is simplified by applying security policy and workflow tools through a centralized management interface.
Total security managment can mitigate network risks and protect data by using information about threats, network vulnerabilities and their severity, assessing possible actions to block an attack, and providing intelligence to assist decision making.
The policy management procedure could be improved. This involves consolidating common policy enforcement tasks into a single interface, as well as automating the policy change process, including compliance checks and managing multiple firewall vendors. This simplified and automated policy management process saves IT time, avoids manual errors, and reduces risk.
How does network security management work?
Network Security Management provides complete network visibility and generates data for resources (resource grouping and classification), firewalls, applications, ports, protocols, VPNs, network address translation (NAT) mechanisms, security policies, and vendor devices. This information is broken down into small pieces for individual devices and analyzed. The data is then transformed into analytics that decipher security operations and turn them into manageable and actionable information needed to create policy. The updated policies are then sent to their enforcement points (firewalls) to secure the network.