It’s big, bad world out there. Malicious attacks on wireless networks are on the rise, and adversaries are constantly coming up with more sophisticated measures and tactics to breach and exploit your network. So how can you protect your network from intrusions? By staying informed regarding emerging threats, and by ensuring your network has key security features in place. Here's our take on the six features to keep your network secure.
6 Security Features Your Wireless Network Needs
1. Next Generation Firewall
Next generation firewalls, such as Cisco Meraki’s Layer 7, are hardware or software-based network security systems that improve the detection and prevention of more sophisticated attacks by enforcing security policies at protocol, port and application levels. These offer the opportunity to enforce access control policies, including blocking certain sites, or controlling encrypted applications like torrent clients. It can use fingerprinting to identify applications, content and users on the network, and ultimately act as a valuable safeguard in network defence.
2. Content Filtering
Having a good content filtering system is a responsible approach to protecting your wireless network’s users from harmful content while continuing to allow them access to the internet. Using whitelisting, it can prevent access to specific users and exclude access to blocked websites, such as explicit sites or torrenting sites.
3. Intrusion Prevention
Intrusion Prevention (IPS) is an important tool in the protection of your wireless network. Intrusion prevention is performed by predefined security policies that determine the level of security needs at a given time. These security policies are refreshed daily, to ensure that your network is always protected from the latest threats and adversaries.
4. Anti-Malware/Anti-Phishing
Malware detection’s purpose is to screen incoming and outgoing HTTP traffic for malware, Trojan horses and phishing websites. After a threat has been detected, they can be blocked by either the signature triggered by the content, or by URL.
5. Automatic VPN
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) allows you to establish long-distance secure network connections. It’s an excellent way to avoid the cost of long-distance leased lines, and can be a valuable business asset. While manually configuring a VPN can be technical, automatic VPN’s such as Cisco Meraki’s site-to-site VPN can help you avoid all the hassles, and enhance the experience by using the cloud to configure, monitor and maintain your VPN.
6. High Availability and Failover
It can be disastrous when critical networks fail, which is why it’s important to have a failover plan in case of downtime and disruptions, so that functions can be assumed by a secondary system in the event of a crisis.
Making sure your network is secure is a necessity, as it forms a vital part of your business and is an incredible asset at risk of being exploited. Ask yourself whether you’ve done all you can to secure your network? If not, now’s the time to take the next step and get secure!
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