4 minute read
Don't risk losing control of your network
By Daniel Sultana, Asia Pacific Regional Director at Paessler
Today, every organisation ranging from those in small scale industries to large multinational banks, are dependent on their networks to connect them to the internet. Essentially, this enables them to provide all the web-based services that serve the personal and professional needs of the people and organisations they connect with daily.
All organisations rely on technology to achieve optimal productivity and efficiency to drive their business success, so if the availability and performance of their network are impacted the collateral damage can be far-reaching. They need to ensure that their employees, management, customers and partners have constant ac cess to the company’s services and the network is the linchpin to all of this.
The impact of IT outages
How do organisations get a handle on the impact of a failure of any part of their IT infrastructure though? For instance, what damage occurs if a mail server crashes? How much do two hours of downtime of the entire IT infrastructure cost? And how high are the financial losses and reputational damage if a website is offline for a day or longer?
The fact is that the average cost of an IT outage is more than $8,000 (AUD) per minute, and because there are so many differences in how businesses operate, downtime, at the low end, can be as much as $200,000 per hour, $430,000 per hour on average, and as much as $770,000 per hour at the higher end, according to Gartner.
In March 2019, Google experienced a global outage that affected its Gmail and Google Drive services, which caused “error messages, suffering high latency and other unexpected behaviour” messages on users’ screens. The outage lasted for around 4.5 hours, which is about half a working day for many. But Google is not alone as there have been major outages that have caused havoc in the past year for Facebook, Slack, Zoom, Salesforce, Southwest Airlines, MyBudget and China Telecom.
Monitoring the cloud and the use of cloud apps
IT teams need to protect numerous and varied network entry points, including mobile and IoT devices, Wi-Fi hotspots and cloud apps.
The IT department may not always be comfortable with the cloud apps employees use at work, but they need to not only ensure the integrity of corporate systems but also set standards for the acceptable use of consumer tools that boost staff productivity, such as Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Zoom and WhatsApp.
Cloud apps are an important aspect of business today and the recent shift of many employees now working from home has compounded the issue further. Organisations should find the right balance between being innovative and collaborative while maintaining the right level of data security. The first step is to set up a cloud policy for the
organisation and its employees, so they know which apps are approved for corporate use and which are banned due to poor data privacy standards and servers being located in another country.
Moving storage and business software to the cloud has been so convenient for all employees, particularly now many are working remotely and the admins love it as they don't have to deal with issues over disk space and software updates anymore. Then suddenly the internet connection fails, and no one can get any work done until the connection is up again.
Personal IoT devices are today’s Trojan Horses
We now use private devices much more naturally in the workplace, perform certain work tasks using them, and are generally much more flexible. But what are the consequences if growing numbers of employees bring their Internet of Things (IoT) devices to work?
The big issue is that attackers are now trying to exploit vulnerabilities in personal IoT devices. Some of the most spectacular IoT-related security incidents were based on exploiting vulnerabilities, although patches were already available for many of them. Patch management is an important issue for organisations to address to ensure employees’ personal devices have the latest software updates installed.
During the employee onboarding process, employees
should register their devices with the IT department before they can connect them to the network. This process should include enabling the appropriate security settings, including being able to wipe a device if it gets lost or stolen.
Risks can be partially mitigated through a policy outlining the permitted use of personal devices, including the required behaviour expected from employees, which is complemented by technical risk management controls to enforce the policy and detect violations.
Mitigating the risks to the network
Security has always been one of the key concerns for networks since they first developed and today it is more important than ever to have a comprehensive strategy to mitigate risks to the network. The use of a monitoring solution as a meta security tool is a vital part of IT security and will ensure organisations have the correct security posture. Monitoring controls the functionality and reliability of all security tools and serves as a fallback to give organisations a central overview of their increasingly complex network infrastructures.
If organisations can continuously monitor the performance and functionality of all components of their IT infrastructure, whether it be hardware, software or data streams, they will ensure they will be protected against data loss. It will not only provide the optimum working conditions for their employees to excel, but it will also ensure customers and partners have constant access to the company’s online services.
