As business leaders move towards 2019, the threat of cybersecurity breaches and attacks remains, and it looks faster, smarter, and more aggressive than ever. According to McAfee research, cybercrime costs organisations $600 billion a year globally, forcing businesses to look at new approaches to IT and networking security.
The traditional security model is broken, a fact reiterated by VMware’s senior vice president and general manager of security products, Tom Corn, who believes that organisations are long overdue in changing their view of IT infrastructure and networking security. Inaction further adds to the high costs of security breaches and data theft.
There are different approaches to improving network security, which involves identifying risks and trying to mitigate threats or the alternative of recognising good behaviour patterns, meaning how the ecosystem should behave in a non-threat and threat scenario.
The network security ‘homecourt advantage’ model looks at infrastructure as an all-encompassing digital ecosystem including apps, users, network data, virtual machines (VMs), hyper servers, virtualisation, etcetera.
Knowing beforehand the usual app and user behaviour, as well as the network data convergence points and the infrastructure configuration, can become advantages in fighting cybercrime. So what can your business do to protect its networking ecosystem?
Firstly, analyse your current networking infrastructure and determine what is good behaviour, how the network and virtual machines should perform, and where your data needs to stay secure. This way, abnormal activity or unauthorised access becomes easier to identify, and measures can be taken to limit disruptions and damages.
Next, once your current network status is established, shift your security strategy focus from the architecture per se – data centre and servers – to securing the apps and data, by adopting a software-centred approach with embedded security layers.
This new approach can proactively fight cybercrime attempts by limiting the attack surface instead of securing a specific perimeter under attack. Also, keep in mind that built-in multi-layers of security in networking are no longer a luxury but a necessity!
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