What is network security monitoring?
Network security monitoring is a term that encompasses many tools, practices, policies, and tactics. All to keep secure and safe networks, with all the data that pass through them. Network monitoring security includes many aspects but mainly identifying potential vulnerabilities, spotting intrusions, controlling access permissions, ensuring safe data transmission, and getting alerted of any risks.
Network security monitoring tools are used to keep track of the security in your networks by collecting, analyzing, and reporting in real time about possible issues and threats. Many of these tools do it in an automated way. Increasing visibility in your networks is a key element to improve its security, avoiding shadow IT and its obscure areas that would otherwise elude your monitoring efforts.
Sometimes network monitoring is used as a synonym for network security monitoring. This is an error as network monitoring supersedes and includes its security. Network monitoring is about optimizing performances, monitoring health, and optimizing any aspect of networks, not just monitoring network security. It is true though that many network monitoring tools have security monitoring capabilities as well, but that's only because the two practices are intertwined, yet not exactly the same.
Within network security monitoring there are a few areas that are more specific in what they monitor and how. Going through them is well over the scope of our guide. We will briefly touch two of the most common ones, to better give you an idea of what network security monitoring may entail.
What is cybersecurity monitoring?
Cybersecurity monitoring is the part of network security monitoring that actively monitors networks or endpoints for security vulnerabilities. Specific tools are used for analyzing the network traffic, ideally each packet, to spot unusual activity that may be due to unauthorized access. If anything suspicious is detected, it is reported to the IT team for further analysis. Services running on the network are checked for viruses, ransomware, phishing attempts and known vulnerabilities.
Network security monitoring tools sometimes are also able to do cybersecurity monitoring tasks, like monitoring traffic packets, but rather often it is not the case. Given the number of duties that are involved in cybersecurity, the two categories of tools are commonly separated. Cybersecurity tools are nowadays nearly always automated, alerting immediately, and taking reactive steps to prevent a data breach or worse. It is not uncommon to pair a cybersecurity solution with a network security monitoring one.
What is SEM monitoring?
SEM stands for Security Event Management and is the series of processes that identify, gather, and evaluate system events and alerts. These are collected in an usually central location through various protocols depending on the origin. SNMP, Syslog and others are often implemented to collect registered events on remote systems, and sent to a SEM monitoring tool for analysis.
SEM monitoring focuses on the process of monitoring these events. SEM-capable tools use statistical calculations and algorithms to identify threats and security risks in the event logs previously collected. Then, if anything worth reporting is found, an alert is sent to IT administrators to intervene. The primary purpose of SEM monitoring is to alert administrators about possible security issues in one of their systems.
SEM monitoring is part of network security monitoring and can be considered similar in scope as of cybersecurity monitoring, even if the latter is a much more complete solution for ensuring security within your networks.
Benefits of network security monitoring
Back to network security monitoring, it may be logical to wonder what are the practical benefits of using one of the many network security monitoring services. Outside the obvious one of increasing the security level of your infrastructure, which alone would be worth setting up such a solution, there are a few more valuable ones.
We cited preventing shadow IT before and it is worth repeating it now. By setting up a security monitoring tool you benefit from the constant scanning of network resources, discovering new ones as they are connected, avoiding dark areas within your infrastructure. These are often easily neglected and become outdated, causing an increased risk for the whole network.
Similarly, by using an automated system like that, one that auto-discovers new hosts and services like Checkmk, you reduce the workload of IT administrators, who are thus free to worry about more critical projects. An automated alerting system, easy to customize, in Checkmk helps to make monitoring efficient and streamlines its configuration.
Network security monitoring tools can save you money. Their license cost is offset by reducing network downtimes as issues are remediated efficiently and even prevented altogether. Network monitoring in general can help you to optimize resources by optimizing only those in need, saving costs of marginally needed resources upgrades. This is especially important for organizations that use cloud services, where every resource usage incurs a cost that can exponentially grow if unmonitored.
Furthermore, network monitoring security is important to keep optimal performance of your networks. By rapidly discovering security threats and issues, you maintain the efficiency of the networks high, avoiding downtimes and slowing down of some areas.
Naturally network security monitoring services do their best in identifying security threats and risks, and doing it early. You can imply or know yourself some of these threats, but a specific tool is automated and quicker in spotting them. If anything, this is the primary benefit of network security monitoring.
Best practices for network security monitoring
Benefits aside, it is important to implement a network security monitoring solution in the right way. Partial or incomplete monitoring would return subpar insight, detracting from all the efforts. A few best practices are to be followed to achieve an optimal network security monitoring setting.
Initially it may be advisable to perform a complete audit to determine your network's baseline performance and spot present vulnerabilities. By identifying unused applications, security gaps, and misconfigurations, you can start your network security monitoring processes with a clean slate.
Create a working protocol for incident response and train relevant personnel on their tasks and responsibilities. To whoever and whatever the network monitoring security tool will report to, these must know how to act when necessary.
Then it is important to set up your network security monitoring tool to monitor a few parts of your network that are not the most logical ones. Unusual traffic, outdated services, user accesses, and misconfigurations that can pose a security risk may be the most obvious ones, but it is not a best practice to stop at them.
Include in your monitoring changes to network configurations, as they may be the result of an unauthorized actor in your network. Every data layer should be recognized and accordingly monitored for edits and accesses. If your tool allows it, automate wherever possible. Auto-discovery, auto-tagging, and default thresholds set on metrics features help a lot in automating your network security efforts. Checkmk does support all these, setting itself as an ideal tool for monitoring networks in small up to enterprise-sized infrastructures.
FAQ
Security monitoring and network security monitoring are sometimes used interchangeably. They are not the same though. Security monitoring encompasses network security, which specializes in monitoring the security of networks and the data that pass through them. The more generic security monitoring is instead focused on more than just that, including monitoring the security of applications, cloud resources, data at rest and much, much more.
SIM, SEM, and SIEM are often used without considering any difference between them, but they are not the same. SIM (Security Information Management) are systems to collect log files into a central repository, usually via the use of monitoring agents on remote. SEM (Security Event Manager) focuses instead on real-time monitoring of events, notifications, and console from a system. Lastly SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) combines SIM and SEM, providing real-time analysis of security alerts from hardware and network applications. SIEM then supersedes both SIM and SEM, merging them together in a single process.