What Is Network Security?

Although not directly supporting the network, there are related cybersecurity technologies that help protect the infrastructure:

Endpoint detection and response (EDR) security solutions continuously monitor all user and endpoint activities to protect them from threats and detect suspicious behavior. They also offer investigation and incident response capabilities, which eradicate the threat and isolate the affected system from impacting the rest of the network.

Email security protects employees from cyber threats and social engineering attacks, including phishing, spear-phishing, and other email-based tactics. It works by examining inbound email to detect potential risk factors. For instance, it can identify communications that contain malware, suspicious links, questionable content and imagery, and other abnormalities — blocking the email from reaching the user’s inbox.

DLP solutions identify sensitive information throughout cloud systems, mitigate accidental data sharing, and prevent data exfiltration. They increase visibility into data stores, helping enterprises track and remediate policy violations, thereby improving internal compliance.

DDoS protection defends against denial-of-service attacks, which aim to overwhelm the corporate network and disrupt operations. FortiDDoS, for example, rapidly inspects data packets and automatically blocks illegitimate traffic from flooding the network.

Application security tools allow administrators to recognize traffic generated by well-known and custom applications. Using IPS protocol decoders, it analyzes traffic to identify applications, enabling admins to quickly form policies to allow, deny, or restrict access to specific apps or entire categories of them. This optimizes bandwidth utilization while also mitigating malware, unauthorized file transfers, and other risks.

CASB solutions provide security to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, users, and data. Inline CASB offers visibility, compliance, and threat protection for data in motion and at rest in cloud apps, but also creates shadow IT reports, risk assessments, and more.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) allow open-architecture CASBs to directly integrate with SaaS providers. This enables admins to scan cloud configurations, ensuring their users are monitored and protected no matter what device they’re using.

Network security in inherently more complex in larger, more complicated IT environments. Fortunately, there are several solutions fit for network protection at scale:

Modern security operations centers (SOC) require a centralized approach to event management. Without it, they lack the context or visibility to protect the organization effectively.

SIEM solutions provide a unified view of security across the enterprise, collecting information from network, endpoint, cloud, and other security products. They also offer behavior-based AI-powered threat detection, investigation, compliance reporting, and more. In short, SIEM reduces the complexity of managing network and security operations.

NDR monitors internal network traffic, baselining normal behaviors and using machine learning (ML) and other analytics to detect malware, malicious traffic, and abnormal patterns that may indicate an attacker within the network. It also provides a robust capability to investigate and take immediate action on verified alerts.

XDR streamlines threat detection and response across an enterprise's security ecosystem. By consolidating data from endpoints, networks, emails, and the cloud, it identifies and links suspicious activities that individual tools might miss. This integrated approach enables quick investigation and remediation of alerts or multi-step incidents through automated and manual actions. Leveraging endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities, XDR provides endpoint agents, telemetry, and endpoint blocking to effectively manage challenges while enhancing threat detection and response capabilities.

The progression from endpoint detection and response (EDR) to managed detection and response (MDR) to extended detection and response (XDR) follows the path of digital acceleration with ever-expanding attack surfaces and a hybrid workforce.

Essentially, the difference between EDR, MDR, and XDR are as follows:

• EDR: Endpoint Detection and Response acts like an alarm system for an organization. When it detects a threat at an endpoint, it immediately alerts the company.
• MDR: Managed Detection and Response is a security approach that focuses on individuals and their behaviors. It prioritizes endpoint protection.
• XDR: Extended Detection and Response takes MDR to the next level with a software-based practice that protects an enterprise's entire infrastructure.

Today, network edges are anywhere the user connects and businesses may not be able to extend security everywhere it’s needed. Managed security service providers (MSSPs) can help fill the gap with the critical expertise and infrastructure required immediately, at less cost.

For example, a managed detection and response (MDR) service can be a great choice for SMBs that need enterprise-grade threat monitoring and response but find it too expensive to build or staff internally.

Larger organizations who need more comprehensive protection of a distributed environment and don’t have the resources in house, can choose an XDR service for cross-layered detection and response. XDR collects, normalizes, and then correlates data over a variety of security layers, including endpoints, firewalls, email, servers, cloud workloads, and the general network. 

MDR is a fully managed threat detection and response service delivered by an outsourced MSSP. With MDR services, security teams can enhance their ability to rapidly detect, investigate, and respond to unauthorized and/or suspicious activity. Some MDR services also offer threat hunting and recommendations for improving overall security posture.

Some MSSPs also extend MDR with XDR which monitors, detects and analyzes security signals across endpoints, network, cloud, SIEM and email security systems. XDR is a new, alternative approach to traditional detection and incident response, integrating detection and response procedures across multiple environments to reduce the mean time to detect and repair attacks.

XDR is a natural extension of EDR suitable for organizations that have complex IT environments or are highly vulnerable to cyberattacks. XDR is highly scalable, supports multiple data sources, and ensures end-to-end protection of an organization’s attack surfaces.

A typical in-house security operations center (SOC) requires a dedicated staff of security engineers and analysts and the tools to support their work. The high cost of running a SOC in house compounded by the shortage of cybersecurity talent and the burnout that often transpires, leads many organizations to choose a managed SOC-as-a-Service (SOCaaS). This allows them to outsource threat hunting, monitoring, detection, and remediation to an MDR or MXDR service provider with the cybersecurity experience,  infrastructure, and tools, to actively monitor customers’ threat surfaces 24/7.

Cloud security is a shared responsibility. In general, the public cloud infrastructure is secured by the service provider—such as AWS, Azure, or GCP—and the workloads running on the infrastructure are secured by the customer. To meet the business imperative of cloud migration, organizations need a network security solution in the cloud that offers advanced protection, flexibility, and predictable costs.

However, organizations that are accelerating their cloud adoption may not have the resources, skills, or time to build, scale, or adapt their cloud security to meet the pace of their business. A managed firewall service allows organizations to offload cloud security infrastructure maintenance, get deep visibility, apply robust controls, and optimize cloud security spend.

A cloud-native, managed firewall service removes the heavy lifting around network security operations and provides a frictionless experience to help customers easily deploy enterprise-grade security on the public cloud.

Cloud migration requires organizations to secure key cloud services. A next-generation, managed firewall service or network Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS)  simplifies security management with full visibility across environments and broad protection across cloud workloads and applications.

Whether a managed firewall service or a network FWaaS, it is critical that organizations ensure that their public cloud workloads are protected by next-generation security solutions powered by comprehensive threat intelligence.

With bad actors increasingly using Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) and other AI technologies to create new, more compelling exploits and threats faster than ever, security teams must also leverage AI technologies to fight fire with fire. AI-powered threat intelligence is arguably the most important use case, as it can help organizations remain in lockstep with emerging threats.

That’s why cybersecurity vendors, including Fortinet, are escalating their AI capabilities. To stay ahead of the curve, IT leaders should ask their providers how they’re applying AI, what technologies their AI tools use, and most importantly, how their applications contribute to one or more of the benefits below: