No matter the size of a business—whether a small healthcare office with only 32 doctors, nurses, assistants, administrators, and receptionists, or a large financial firm with over 400 risk assessors, trade makers, human resource assistants, and compliance professionals—network security is a growing concern as businesses recognize the risks of insecure networks. Which can lead to the question: Who is watching your network security?
The nephew of the owner’s brother-in-law, Doug
When businesses start, they often save money by hiring a small company or individual to develop their first network. This individual, sometimes the friend of a friend or the relative of an employee, pulls some Cat-5 Ethernet cable and connects the wireless routers to the cable modem. He then makes sure the desktops and laptops can connect to each other and, when the need arises, comes to the office to type the network security key into new devices. Although Doug means well, managing your office might only be his side job or he might not have time to keep up-to-date on security threats or even to update your routers’ firmware if needed.
An off-the-shelf security product
Perhaps your office manager saw a product on the office store shelf and thought it would be a good idea to install it on your network. It might offer features such as virus/Trojan horse scanning, a network threat scan, and perhaps a software firewall to protect the device where the program is installed. Perhaps an executive assistant read a story about something she could download and install and protect against online threats. Regardless, the off-the-shelf solution offers very localized protection for individual computers or mobile devices, but it doesn’t know your network, its topology, and its switches, routers, and other connecting devices. The off-the-shelf product probably works passively, requiring someone to trigger the scans and to update threat signatures and software when someone thinks of it.
An Eastern European crime syndicate
Someone, somewhere has probably already scanned your network. Malicious actors and even just curious kids often simply probe computer networks to find open ports and whatever they can about public and private networks using simple tools they download from the Internet. They compile lists of networks and their discovered vulnerabilities. The bad guys later use this information in targeted attacks. Those later attacks might simply use your network as the source for launching denial of service attacks against other targets. Those later attacks, however, might breach your system for client or billing information. You definitely don’t want an Eastern European crime syndicate or some script kiddie in Ohio watching your network security.
Let Centre Technologies watch your network security
Centre Technologies has a proven track record helping businesses who could not answer the question “Who’s watching your network security?” We take into consideration your business, its needs, and its existing network to build flexible solutions that proactively monitor for threats. We keep abreast of the latest technologies and products to provide the best and most current solutions so we can worry and you can do your business securely.
Centre Technologies
