Background

When I was a network designer, I believe network security was a burden and it seem to stall my projects. Security requirements were forced upon my designs, and I spent most of my time getting exemptions. As the industry became more digitalised and I gain enterprise architecture experience. I realise the importance of network security to a organisation. It is so important that, 31 percent of cyber attacks has led to a personel getting dismissed.

Therefore, it is concerning when a customer doesn’t care about network security. They explain that they haven’t been “hacked yet” and they only need to implement “tactical solutions” to meet compliance. I believe this attitude is coming from the fact that security is difficult to comprehend and quite extensive. To overcome this, I start to discuss 3 reasons why…

Why should an organisation care about network security?

• To protect their data because it contains their intellectual property.
• To safeguard their customer’s data because trust is hard to earn.
• To preserve their branding because that is everything.

Why are organisations successfully attacked?

• They employ humans. Humans are lazy, forgetful and easily fooled.
• Software that is created/procure, most likely have vulnerabilities.
• Someone out there, will be incentivise by attacking them. This could be a hacker or a competitor.

How does an organisation protect themselves from a networking security point of view?

• Install a robust security perimeter to make it hard to get in.
• Apply zero trust network architecture to reduce the blast radius if someone does get in.
• Implement visibility and controls around their egress traffic to ensure critical data does not get out.

What steps can an organisation take to begin?

• Discover regulations and standards that applies to their industry such as PCI DSS, HIPAA Australia and Australia Essential 8. 
• Research suitable frameworks to implement at their organisation such as NIST, COBIT and MITRE ATT&CK
• Assess the value of the asset they are protecting from a procurement and availability point of view. Then work out how much they are willing to spend to protect it.

What metrics can the organisation use to determine if the solution is worthwhile?

• Did the solution reduce the time to detect a breach?
• Did the solution reduce the time to respond and quarantine the affected asset?
• Did the solution reduce the time to remediate and return the asset to a known safe state?

In summary, I hope these reasons spark interest in exploring the importance of network security and how it can protect your organisation. Note, this is only one domain of cybersecurity. However I believe it is a great point to holistically secure your organisation and should be a foundation of your defence in depth strategy moving forward.