A solid network foundation is the key to business agility, process efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness. This allows companies to establish competitive advantages, extend or improve their operations and run business applications to respond accurately to the customer expectations.
Businesses can now affordably be spread across the globe and have inter-office collaboration on a daily basis. But all of that interconnectedness relies in large part on the ability to protect the networks that create those connections.
It is almost impossible for all the firewalls, IPS, IDS and antivirus software you install on a business network to stop every security threat! The last years have seen hackers and web criminals become more and more effective at compromising the networks, as they have quickly developed newer and more malicious threats to network security. So in a way to increase the degree of efficiency for any security tool you need to rely on a security policy which means involving the employees to help keep your network safe.
In fact, the employee is on the front line, deciding every day whether or not to open a mysterious email file attachment or downloading suspicious content. The employee should be made aware not only of network security importance but also of what he can do to prevent security attacks to the company and obviously also to himself.
The most difficult part of the job is to ask employees to change their behavior! They may have to stop sticking down their passwords in plain sight, stop downloading untrusted contents from the Internet and start using passwords or stronger passwords on their devices: laptop, tablet, smartphone… The key solution is to incite the network users to follow your security policies by highlighting for them the benefit from tighter network security and showing them the good habits when using the company network, even if that means they can’t access their social network profiles from the company internet access.
In the following, some ways you can adopt to teach the employees about network security:- Make network security personal
Network security may probably seem like an abstract concept to most employees, but may obviously have personal devices and may use them for online shopping; you can use that scenario to change their behavior either on the home network or on the company’s one.
Explain to the employees the importance of protecting their information, including details about their identity, by following security policies to keep the business network locked down.
- Be accessible to network users
- Engage the company in ongoing security training
As we said before, hackers are constantly developing new clever methods to trick even the most cautious internautes into downloading their malware or respond to a hoax email to get an unauthorized access, misuse, modify or deny network-accessible resources.
In way to help your users stay aware of the lasts threats tricks; you should give theme network security training from their beginning at the company, and the training should be ongoing. Network users need also regular reminders, whether it’s to change their network access password every month or tips on recognizing the latest phishing scheme.
- Tell your networkers what to do
- Make security easy as possible
Even the most well trained and caring networkers would be tempted to circumvent difficult security measures; so, try to ease the security so the employees follow the security policy.
Proceedings like periodical prompting for passwords change or nightly automatic anti-virus software update should be adopted. Also, think of rewarding employees for their efforts on keeping your network safe.
As we continue to become an ever more networked society, the financial benefits attainable by hacking a network increase. As a result, it should come as no surprise that the number of attacks and the creativity spent in trying to breach a network continue to increase.
Consequently, the network administrator who is tasked with defending network must continue to educate himself and the company workforce on the newest types of attacks and make the necessary preparations to prevent against them.