Information Technology Security Monitor Network Traffic
Information technology security is an array of practices, protocols and technologies designed to protect an organization’s digital assets. The practice involves creating and using secure systems for handling sensitive data, including monitoring networks to identify vulnerabilities and mitigate threats.
The goal of information technology security is to ensure that unauthorized people cannot access confidential or proprietary information, or damage the integrity of existing data. This involves assessing risk and using appropriate safeguards to limit access, such as encryption or passwords. It also encompasses enforcing policies and procedures to prevent information leaks, loss or theft.
In addition to traditional network defenses, which include firewalls and intrusion detection systems, organizations can use other tools to monitor traffic, such as application performance monitoring (APM) solutions that track and report on the use of resources on individual applications or services. These solutions are often used to spot potential cyberattacks and to optimize network performance by identifying bottlenecks.
Flow-based monitoring (NetFlow and sFlow) uses real-time data to provide visibility into the movement of network packets across an enterprise, providing useful insights for administrators. These insights can help them detect unauthorized WAN traffic, optimize network performance and utilization, and monitor for suspicious malware or other security incidents.
To improve visibility and efficiency, some network traffic analysis solutions offer a range of filtering options that can reduce the size of incoming or outgoing data streams. They can also analyze the contents of each individual packet of data, enabling granular visibility into how applications are being used and which devices or users they are connecting from.
How Does Information Technology Security Monitor Network Traffic?
Many network security solutions offer automated responses to threats that can isolate affected devices, modify firewall rules or block rogue IP addresses. These automated responses can help businesses respond to a security incident quickly, reducing downtime and minimizing damage to the organization’s infrastructure and data.
The key to successful information technology security is a strong understanding of how threats work and the vulnerabilities that they target. Continuous network monitoring and traffic analysis helps an organization identify the behaviors that signal a threat and allows it to take action before the attack is complete, limiting damage and minimizing loss of valuable data.
Using network traffic analytics to identify and prioritize security threats also enables an organization to anticipate when its IT infrastructure might need updating. The continuous monitoring and reporting that comes with most NTA solutions identifies performance metrics based on past and current use, which administrators can then compare against benchmarks to determine the best configuration for the organization’s unique needs.
The type of monitoring solution an organization chooses depends on the types of sources it has available to collect data from and how scalable the system is, whether it requires a dedicated hardware setup or is suitable for virtual storage. NTA solutions that are agentless typically collect data via methods already supported by an organization’s IT infrastructure, such as syslog on firewalls and SNMP on network devices. In some cases, these tools can also extract data from packets by performing deep packet inspection, a process that involves examining the contents of each individual data packet in real time.
