With BYOD, IoT devices, and distributed applications, organizations need reliable network access control solutions to protect sensitive dataConsider these best practices to ensure your NAC solution is optimized for your organization.
Ideally, your organization would practice the principle of least privilege by granting employees only the network resources needed to do their jobsHowever, many networks must be more significant to implement pure privilege-based access.
Automated Policy Enforcement
Network access control solutions can inspect devices to assess their security posture, enabling organizations to block noncompliant devices from accessing the corporate network and reducing the company’s digital attack surfaceThis helps to ensure the security of sensitive data and minimize the risk of attacks by malware or unauthorized applications.
NAC can also provide granular control over which network resources each device and user has access to based on an organization’s policies and how those policies are enforcedThis enables businesses to reduce their bandwidth consumption, which is a common source of waste in the enterprise, and it can help to improve performance by ensuring that network traffic is optimized to meet business needs.
Automated policy enforcement is essential to ensuring that NAC policies are effective, but this requires a platform that can deliver real-time changes in compliance and securityVelotix’s patented AI engine learns from historical requests and returns relevant and real-time recommendations, ensuring continuous improvementThis can reduce the number of human-confirmed policy exceptions and provide greater autonomy for teamsIn addition, this enables the automation of manual processes and can be used to build dynamic workflows that are consistent, repeatable, and auditable.
On-the-Fly Incident Response
With the rise of BYOD and remote work, it’s more important than ever to ensure that a security team is prepared for every incidentThat’s where a network access control solution comes in handyThese tools can enforce protocols, share contextual information, and isolate risky devices at the point of connection to prevent malicious activity.
A NAC solution also helps with the first step of incident response—triggering the right people when a threat is detectedAlerting tools like PagerDuty or Opsgenie can notify on-call engineers and keep track of escalation pathsThis can reduce the time between an event and a SOC team being convened.
Another choke point is the time it takes to transfer extensive data sets from a host system to the incident response vendorThis process can be improved by having a practiced plan that can be followed quickly and efficientlyThis may include having a member of the SOC trained in collecting and transferring disk images, RAM, and select logs to minimize the risk of destruction while allowing for quick analysis and forensics.
Role-Based Access Control
Role-based access control (RBAC) assigns permissions by a role rather than the individual userThis allows for more granular, consistent permission management across departments and employeesHowever, it can be challenging to implement and maintain.
Before implementing RBAC, analyze your workforce and identify what access they needThis will help you avoid common role design pitfalls like excessive or insufficient granularity and granting too many exceptions.
It’s essential to limit the “blast radius” of a potential breach by only allowing people in specific roles access to the critical files and data they needFor instance, a junior network engineer should have limited access to the configuration of the company’s routers; their job is to cross-check the equipment, not modify it.
RBAC can be difficult to implement in large organizations with a diverse workforce, but it’s vital for meeting regulatory compliance in sensitive industries like healthcare and financial servicesIn addition to minimizing risk, it can save companies money by reducing the resources they need to manageIt is also easier to apply and update as the needs of an organization change.
Device Management
Modern businesses rely on devices of all shapes and sizes for business-critical tasksDevice management solutions ensure these devices are managed, secure, and connected to the right resourcesBy enforcing security policies, preventing unwanted access to the network, and resetting or turning off non-compliant devices until users navigate automated remediation processes, NAC solutions strengthen network defenses and lower costs by automating significant IT and Help Desk tasks.
Organizations need a robust device management strategy to support a mobile workforce and protect corporate data, whether a BYOD or a corporate-owned and managed deviceNAC solutions integrating with MDM and others enable a unified approach to managing devices across the entire lifecycle, from deployment and management to updates, configurations, and security policy enforcement.
Using separate systems for managing security permissions creates a lot of overhead and complexity for ITNAC solutions that integrate with MDM tools and other security solutions can help reduce complexity and cost while improving overall network performance.
Monitoring
Most network access control solutions offer a monitor mode so that IT staff can see the impact of policies on actual network activityThis helps IT teams spot problems and adjust policies as necessary before these issues become widespread, resulting in a high volume of support tickets.
When appropriately implemented, network access control also helps reduce cyber threats by limiting malware’s scope of actionFor example, if an authorized employee downloads a malicious file, NAC can prevent that file from spreading across the organizationThis helps ensure that unwitting actors don’t compromise intellectual property and sensitive data.
Role-based access control (RBAC) is another security benefit of NAC, reducing the risk of data breaches by only allowing authorized users to access specific dataThis is similar to parental controls on a small scale and helps protect the integrity of business-critical dataNAC can also help segment guest devices from full-time employees, granting them enough access to get the job done without exposing the internal network to hackersThis can be especially useful for IoT devices, which may be challenging to monitor.