Network Change & Security Monitoring in Big Companies (in-house)
It’s a changing world with Network Security Monitoring Tools
NOC (network operations center), analyzing and operating cybersecurity systems is more difficult today than it was two years ago. This is due to the rapidly evolving threat landscape, the increasing volume of cybersecurity telemetry data, and the growing volume of alerts.
Traditionally, security operations teams have dealt with these problems manually, by throwing people at them. This has left many security organizations behind the eight ball. Next-generation SOCs will rely heavily on automation to address this issue, according to him.
SecOps teams will be able to achieve more if they adopt network and IT support technologies such as decision automation, he said.
Modern SOCs are structured differently and do different things. Several are extensions of enterprise network operations centers (NOCs), while others tend to be the monitoring arm of security organizations. Network stability is a major focus of SOCs that evolve from NOCs. Those developed by security organizations tend to be focused on IDS/IPS, SIEM, and other alerting tools.
SOCs with a higher level of automation typically use commercial or in-house tools.
NOC or SOC: Big-company constructs
SOCs have been and remain a feature of large companies. 451 Research found that 77% of companies with more than 10,000 employees have a security operations center, compared to just 22% of companies with fewer than 250 employees. Almost three-quarters (74%) of SOCs operate round-the-clock; 70% of them are in-house.
SOC functions have not changed much on a high level. In the end, its mission remains to help enterprises manage cyber risks, but the mechanics of its operation have changed. Enterprise mobility and cloud adoption have significantly broadened the enterprise footprint in recent years. The data and applications that used to reside on-premises servers are now spread across cloud systems and data centers, sometimes across continents.
SOCs must have visibility that extends far beyond the traditional enterprise perimeter to effectively detect and respond to threats in the new environment.
Do you know much about the pricing of NOC services?
You should keep an eye on the following network changes.
Updates to the network device’s operating state
Logging into a network device and making changes can cause the device’s running state to change. As soon as a network device boots, its parameters are stored in a configuration file. Changing the running state of the device does not affect the configuration file, only the running device.
As a result of incorrectly made changes, a performance problem occurs, and the NOC operator attempts to diagnose it. It can take a while to find the change since the network operator isn’t always aware of what the change is.
Troubleshooting can be sped up by showing the NOC operator the changes made to the device through a networking monitoring and configuration tool. Those details can then be passed on to the network engineers, so they won’t have to hunt for the problem themselves. Also, there’s a chance the tool will allow the NOC operator to fix the problem without involving the network engineers.
Changes to the network not saved
The person who makes an unsaved network change doesn’t save it to the boot configuration file to fix a performance problem.
The NOC team can use this information to inform the engineers that someone made a change but did not save it.
Changing the boot configuration of the network device
Suppose a new IT regulation has been implemented and a company needs to modify this network device to comply with it. A network engineer makes the change to the boot configuration during the normal change window since this is not a critical change.
The network engineer’s change may have a negative side effect when the device reboots, likely in the middle of the night. The side effect might appear immediately or after a lot of people have been using the network.
NOC operators often notice that there’s a performance issue and need to figure out what happened. With the networking performance monitoring and configuration tool, the NOC operator can view performance changes over time. It is possible to track performance changes for up to 30 days.
When the operator determines the cause of the performance problem, they can send a ticket to network engineering explaining, “I noticed a change at 2:00 a.m. Maybe that’s helpful, or maybe that’s the problem.”
A change in the network device’s software
As opposed to a configuration change, this is a software change. Many vendors such as Apple, Microsoft, and Cisco send out software updates. These updates don’t always work as intended and may have negative side effects.
The negative impact of a change to the boot configuration of a device may not be immediately apparent.
However, network operators can identify any potential problems using a network performance monitoring and configuration tool.
It is important to share information about network changes
The bottom line is that by making change information available to NOC operators, their value to their organization increases. In other words, they can now let network engineering know the probable cause of a performance problem. Rather than just saying there’s a problem. That means they can find and fix the issue more quickly, so everyone is back up and running sooner.
It is much more effective to monitor the network proactively for changes. Rather than react to performance issues and then spend time trying to figure out the cause.
An outage that lasted 14 hours cost Facebook an estimated $90 million. With these costs in mind, implementing a networking performance monitoring and configuration tool. These tools can not only increase productivity but also save a business a lot of money.
