For most IT organizations, network monitoring is an essential tool. Network monitoring tools play an important role in letting IT pros get complete visibility into the status of network devices, systems, and applications, keeping the IT team aware of problems with services, networks, application performance, and more.
But despite Network Monitoring's reputation as an IT Swiss-Army Knife, Security is one area where these tools are rarely used to their full potential.
That's too bad because you can easily put the data and insights generated by network monitoring to good use for security purposes.
With a little tweaking and creative thinking, you can put the information, alerts, and reports that network monitoring tools are designed to give to work beefing up your security posture.
And in a world where 68% of all data breaches took months or longer to discover, according to Verizon’s 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), who wouldn't want all the help they can get monitoring for breaches?
And because most organizations already use these tools, they can provide added security value without the cost of a new tool. That's good news for organizations with a limited budget for security tools.
In our newest eBook, 4 Ways to Strengthen Data Security With Network Monitoring, we'll give you four techniques you can use to put your network monitoring solution to work for security. Check out a brief synopsis of each technique below, and be sure to download the full eBook, available here, for more.
1. Discover Breaches Faster
With a modern network monitoring tool, you can set up email notifications and alerts for changes to the configuration of network devices, and audit configuration against defined policies. WhatsUp Gold also lets users view and compare device configurations in the device properties page, and if configurations are lost, you can automate network device configuration backups for any device that supports Telnet or SSH.
2. Detect Cryptominers Using Your Resources
With a modern network monitoring tool, like WhatsUp Gold, you can easily monitor for CPU spikes and set up alerts for when CPU usage exceeds 90% (or any other threshold you want) on machines that don't regularly perform CPU-intensive tasks. This is a simple way to keep track of your machines and find out if there's anything strange going on.
3. Detect DDoS Attacks and Anomylous Network Behavior
By monitoring real-time bandwidth usage and historical bandwidth trends, network flow monitoring can proactively identify security issues like DDoS attacks, unauthorized downloading and other suspicious and potentially malicious network behavior.
4. Detect Access to the Dark Web
With WhatsUp Gold, you can alert administrators when users access the Dark Web (Tor) with a feature that monitors all Network Traffic Analyzer Sources and can alert admins when any host exceeds a configurable number of connections to known Tor ports during a set period. This allows administrators to control access to the Dark Web by their users.
Want to know more? Download the free PDF.