Advantages Of Implementing Network Access Control In Your Organization
Network access control is a way to track devices on your corporate network. It could assist in preventing illegal devices from accessing your network infrastructure, like empty ports, and block malware attacks.
Managing identity and permissions is a continuous task for security teams. This includes integrating existing directory systems to verify identities and assign permission roles to employees.
Cost-Effectiveness
Network access control provides a layer of protection that makes it difficult for cybercriminals to infiltrate the organization. NAC ensures that only devices and users with updated patches, antivirus software, and a valid device certificate can access the network. This prevents the spread of a ransomware attack or other malware that exploits recently-published vulnerabilities.
It also helps businesses comply with BYOD policies that allow employees to work on devices of their choice. NAC is beneficial when collaborating with contractors, consultants, and guests. These third parties must be able to use the same tools as regular employees, but they should also have limited access to sensitive data.
One of the advantages of network access control helps to automate the process of recognizing, authenticating, and profiling users and devices, ensuring that only those authorized to access a corporate network are allowed to do so. It also works as an active discovery tool that uncovers unauthorized devices before they can infiltrate the network, reducing the risk of a costly breach. NAC is also cost-effective because it enables IT teams to avoid hiring additional IT resources to monitor and adjust security policy.
Scalability
Network access control solutions provide significant scalability that can meet the needs of most organizations. The feature set varies among vendors, but all network access control solutions can detect devices and users on your local area network (LAN) and assign security permissions accordingly. This allows for a high-bandwidth connection for endpoints while protecting sensitive data from threats.
In addition to scalability, most network access control vendors integrate with other essential IT security components. This can help eliminate security gaps as your business grows and evolves. Moreover, it helps consolidate your security posture into a single line of accountability and defense.
Conducting an extensive network inventory exercise before selecting a network access control vendor is advisable. This will surface any unmapped endpoints and existing access gateways and provide you with an IP volume estimate to aid budgeting. You may also consider a network access control solution with dynamic and automatic device segmentation based on user or device identities, risk levels, network context, and more. This reduces your attack surface and ensures that illegitimate devices are isolated and quarantined without interrupting BAU operations.
Flexibility
Network access control is an additional layer of security that prevents users and devices from gaining access to data that Network access control won’t allow any unauthorized user. This can mitigate the risk of unauthorized information access, reducing the risk of a data breach and meeting compliance requirements.
A NAC solution can provide flexibility by allowing you to customize permissions for different roles and allow or deny access to specific applications on the network. Additionally, NAC solutions can integrate with other IT systems, mobile device management, and next-generation firewalls to help you reduce security gaps.
Above all you can configure the NAC as pre-admission or post-admission, depending on the type of protection required for your organization. Pre-admission NAC ensures that all users and devices have complied with your corporate security policies before they gain access to the network. This can also help to limit lateral movement within the web and limit the damage from a cyber attack. It can even require a user or device to re-authenticate when they try to enter a different part of the network, which can help to limit the spread of a malware infection.
Incident Response
Any business owner can configure the most NAC solutions in a monitoring mode that allows IT to gauge the impact of policies on devices, users, and applications before they are enacted. This can be useful for organizations that need to grant access to non-employees, such as contractors and guests.
Network access control also provides visibility into all devices that connect to the network. This can be a valuable capability when dealing with the proliferation of IoT devices, which often lack. Or sometimes these are incapable of installing security updates or antivirus software and thus threaten other systems within the organization.
NAC solutions can be used to identify these devices and limit their access to the network. This will happen until they have been patched or otherwise updated. This can help mitigate various vulnerabilities, including worms and ransomware. In addition, NAC can isolate these rogue devices into a quarantine virtual local area network (VLAN). Therefore, that they don?t spread the infection to other systems on the corporate network. This can significantly reduce the impact of a vulnerability and allow your team to focus on remediating the problem.
Security
Network access control bolsters security by ensuring users and devices comply with corporate security policies. Being an owner of the organization you can do this through pre-admission authentication and by denying or disconnecting unauthorized devices. It also provides visibility into the network and allows IT teams to monitor user and device activity in real time. You can even quickly catch malicious or accidental actions.
For example, if you are unable to update a device with the latest antivirus software. NAC solutions can detect this. even this can isolate the unpatched machine from other business systems. This significantly mitigates the risk of ransomware or DDoS attacks from exposed vulnerabilities.
NAC solutions also help prevent data breaches by limiting the amount of data users access. Furthermore you can easily configure to restrict access to critical information to only those employees who need it for their jobs. This helps reduce the risk of data theft, a significant driver for businesses to implement network access control.
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