What is Network Security?
What is Network Security?
Network security is the technology, policies, and processes used to protect an organization's data, workloads, and cloud infrastructure from unauthorized access and misuse. An organization's network connects critical internal data and resources with the public internet. Network security protects resources across various networking layers from security risks, ensuring data confidentiality, availability, integrity, and usability.
What are the benefits of network security?
Customers, employees, and software users trust organizations to protect their privacy and safety when accessing resources. A robust network security improves efforts to help organizations reduce data risks, improve service availability, and maintain a flexible workforce.
Protect sensitive data
Organizations collect, store, and process sensitive data to support their operations. Strong network security can help organizations prevent unauthorized access to stored data and comply with data privacy laws.
Ensure application availability and reliability
Enterprise applications rely on a secure network to function. If a network is compromised, user experience and organizational operations will be disrupted. Effective network security strategies can help reduce the threat from affecting an application or, if compromised, accelerate recovery time.
Create flexible working opportunities
More companies choose to adopt a hybrid working environment. They safeguard computers and devices that employees use for remote work with network security measures and protection tools. Such an approach enables companies to monitor the apps that employees install, apply security updates, and report suspicious activities to their security team.
What are the network security control types?
Network security is a series of policies and controls that help protect resources while ensuring secure data flows and system integrity.
Four separate areas of network security controls work together to help protect an organization against threats.
Preventative controls
Network-based preventative policies and controls help protect your data, workloads, and cloud infrastructure. In this phase, you can use a layered defense approach. For example, you can block unauthorized access attempts to an organization's internal network, prevent access to critical applications, and stop large data transfers to external parties.
Cybersecurity risks arise from authorized network access, including unintended data access and ransomware events. Network administrators deploy preventative controls, such as firewalls, identity and access management (IAM) controls, and network segmentation. For example, you can configure a web application firewall to block suspicious IP addresses from connecting to internal servers.
Proactive controls
Proactive controls are designed to prevent the creation of noncompliant resources across the network. These controls stop network vulnerabilities from being introduced into the environment. Proactive network controls include rules such as IAM roles restricting resource creation and compliance-based infrastructure creation. For example, you can configure all storage to be strictly non-public by default.
Detective controls
Detection is a cybersecurity activity that identifies threats or unauthorized traffic that slips through preventative defense parameters. Here, security teams utilize detection tools, including behavioral analytics, threat intelligence solutions, and intrusion prevention systems, to identify unusual patterns within an organization's network. A good detection system identifies threats and alerts security personnel to help prevent widespread damage to digital assets. For example, an intrusion detection system (IDS) detects login attempts from unauthorized devices and escalates the incident to the security team for investigation.
Responsive controls
Responsive controls help an organization limit the impact of a network security event and recover its operations. During an incident, automated remediation services begin, and security teams implement response plans, informing stakeholders of the mitigative steps they will take to contain network threats. Automated systems and security teams work in combination to isolate affected networks, recover data from backups, and conduct forensic analysis to remove threats from the network. Once contained, teams use their findings to strengthen the network security, improve the response plan, refine data loss prevention strategies, and prevent similar attacks in the future.
What are the types of network security solutions?
Security teams use various types of network security tools and strategies to prevent, detect, and respond to network threats. We share common examples below.
Network access control
Network access control (NAC) prevents unauthorized users and non-compliant devices from accessing an organization's network and proprietary assets. NAC often works in conjunction with identity and access management (IAM) and role-based access control (RBAC) solutions. Together, they allow security teams to grant access permission to users based on their role, time of access, location, and other parameters. When you implement NAC, the network authenticates each user and device attempting to connect to the server. Once authenticated, the system assesses the user's permission level and, depending on the result, grants or denies access.
Firewalls
Firewalls are specialized software or hardware that monitor and filter network traffic according to predefined rules. They are often placed at the edge of the network to block harmful traffic. A basic firewall can prevent traffic that comes from a list of suspicious IP addresses. Over the years, firewalls have evolved to include advanced network monitoring capabilities that are more suitable for web applications and cloud environments.
WAF
A web application firewall (WAF) is a type of firewall that improves web security. The WAF monitors HTTP traffic, a type of protocol that websites use to communicate between the server and the browser. When deployed, the WAF protects the web application against specific cyber threats, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. SQL injection occurs when threat actors inject code into a database to steal or manipulate records. Meanwhile, XSS is an attack where malicious scripts are placed on a legitimate website to steal sensitive information.
NGFW
Next-generation firewall (NGFW) expands on the traditional firewall's capabilities. Like a firewall, an NGFW monitors incoming and outgoing traffic based on pre-determined rules. However, it adds advanced monitoring features, such as performing deep packet inspection, to uncover hidden threats and data patterns that normal firewalls might miss.
DDoS protection
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a cyber event designed to affect the availability of a targeted system, such as a website or application. This stops legitimate end users from being able to access and use these services. Typically, attackers generate large volumes of packets or requests in an attempt to overwhelm the target system. A DDoS attack uses multiple compromised or controlled sources to generate the attack
Endpoint security
Endpoint security refers to tools, policies, and methods that strengthen the digital security of devices on the network and devices requesting remote access. Endpoint security solutions may have multiple functions, including patch monitoring, traffic analysis, encryption verification, and service control, including application limiting. Mobile device management (MDM) is a specific form of endpoint security for mobile devices connected to the enterprise environment.
Remote access VPN
A virtual private network (VPN) routes incoming and outgoing traffic through secure servers. There, the VPN scrambles the data that users send and receive with encryption technologies. It also conceals the user's IP address, allowing them to remain anonymous on the internet. This will enable employees to connect securely to an organization's network, even when working in public locations with unsecured Wi-Fi.
What are network security strategies?
Organizations can establish a robust network security management framework by implementing targeted strategies that encompass various types of devices, users, and networking architectures.
Zero trust network access
Zero trust network access (ZTNA) ensures that only trusted users and devices can access network resources. It helps security teams protect the computer network from both internal and external threats. ZTNA is based on the principle of least privilege, where users are granted permission only for the data required to accomplish their job.
For example, consider a department manager attempting to access the company's financial database. Even though they're using a company laptop connected to the corporate VPN and are a senior employee, the ZTNA system will still use multiple verification steps. It will verify the user's identity through multi-factor authentication, check their device's security status (up-to-date patches, antivirus software), validate their location and time of access, and confirm the user has the correct permissions for the specific database.
ZTNA will then only grant access to that specific application and not the entire network, while continuously monitoring the session for suspicious activity. If any security condition changes (like detecting malware on their device), access is immediately revoked. This "never trust, always verify" approach applies to every access request, every time, regardless of the user's role or location.
Network segmentation
Network segmentation divides a network into smaller sections, making it easier to manage and secure. First, security teams categorize users and resources based on their work groups and interconnections. Then, they group similar users and resources into the same network segment, with firewalls and other network security devices at the border. This allows security teams to apply specific network access policies and prevent unauthorized users from accessing network resources.
Additionally, network segmentation helps prevent unauthorized software that infects a computer from spreading across an organization. For example, if you segment your corporate networks based on business departments, data incidents affecting marketing units will unlikely affect human resources.
User and entity behavior analytics
Analyzing the behavior of users, devices, and networking infrastructure helps preempt potential data risks. Security teams can detect abnormal behavior with machine learning and data analytics. For example, if an employee suddenly logs into their mobile app and downloads a large amount of sensitive data, the network security system immediately alerts the security personnel.
How can AWS support your network security requirements?
AWS network security services give you fine-grained protections at the host, network, and application-level boundaries. For example:
- Amazon VPC security groups provide protection at the host level for resources in your AWS workloads.
- AWS Network Firewall allows you to tightly control traffic to, from, and between your VPCs at the network level. It includes capabilities such as stateful inspection, intrusion prevention, and web filtering.
- The AWS Web Application Firewall enables you to filter any part of the web request, such as IP addresses, HTTP headers, HTTP body, or URI strings, to block common attack patterns, including SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
- AWS Shield protects your networks and applications from even the largest DDoS attacks and offers managed detection and response to fend off targeted attacks.
- AWS Firewall Manager makes it easy to bring new applications and resources into compliance by enforcing a common set of security rules.
Get started with network security on AWS by creating a free account today.