Top Three Things You Need To Do To Secure Your Network

Every organisation wants to keep their corporate networks safe. We asked Frank Dickson from Frost and Sullivan for his top three tips for securing your network.

Network lock image from Shutterstock.

Basic Hygiene

“Basic hygiene – patch and maintain. If you think about the number of hacks, approximately three-quarters of all hacks are because systems aren’t updated or patched. It’s not sexy but it’s basic,” says Dickson.

Authentication

Dickson told us there needs to be close attention paid to the validity of authentication and the use of strong technology to prevent theft and spoofing of user accounts.

“Let’s do two-factor, let’s do some kind of USB key, some kind of device fingerprinting – something to improve the level of authentication”.

Keep it simple

Here’s a recipe for disaster. Dickson told us of a client that was using 85 different security tools from 45 different vendors. Getting those to all interoperate was incredibly difficult and made life very difficult for the security team.

“Instead of getting the best intrusion prevention system (IPS) or the best firewall or the best antivirus, think about how to bring security controls together and link them and make them easier to utilise and maintain,” says Dickson

Anthony Caruana attended Intel FOCUS 15 in Las Vegas as a guest of Intel Australia