Network Security Monitoring Software | SolarWinds

What is network security monitoring software?

Network security monitoring software is built to detect and analyze activities potentially indicating security issues. By offering cybersecurity warnings, network cybersecurity monitoring solutions can enable you to act quickly and protect your business from network intrusion and subsequent disaster.

To discover cybersecurity threats, network security monitoring software is designed to collect metrics around client-server communications, encrypted traffic sessions, and other network operations. It also enables you to perform traffic analysis to find patterns in traffic flow. Additionally, you can create automatic security alerts and reports, allowing you to respond to suspicious behavior and take appropriate actions more quickly.

Visualizations offered by network security monitoring tools can also leverage threat intelligence to generate easy-to-understand charts and graphs, potentially improving admin efforts to investigate network traffic, pinpoint malicious activities, and troubleshoot security threats.

Why is network cybersecurity monitoring important?

Network cybersecurity monitoring can help protect your enterprise data—ranging from business stats to personal user information—from malicious actors and hackers. Data loss and corruption can dangerously impact network performance, end-user satisfaction, and even business reputation.

Monitoring network cybersecurity can also help you make sure other aspects of your network are performing well—this includes availability, status, behavior, and component configuration, which can be critical to improving your overall security posture.

Network security monitoring can help you put processes in place to effectively respond to security issues and quickly begin problem-solving. Gather information on data in transit and at rest with network security monitoring—the more security data you collect, the higher your chances of uncovering a security threat.

Network cybersecurity monitoring tools are designed to help you anticipate authorized and unauthorized user action. These predictive measures can help reduce the time it takes to discover, understand, and address security breaches. Since cyberattacks can happen in seconds, the speed at which you detect suspicious activity is critical.

How can network monitoring be made safer?

Here are four key ways you can help strengthen the safety of network monitoring:

1. Manage user permissions

   By restricting access to only the users who need it—and only giving users necessary
   privileges—you can prevent intentional or accidental malicious actions. This includes file deletion,
   data modification, and even the theft of proprietary information.

   Keeping track of user permissions includes managing which users have particular access rights and which users
   don’t have access to certain privileges. As soon as a user no longer requires particular
   access—for example, if an employee is leaving or changing positions—their permissions must be
   revoked to prevent the copying and sharing of unauthorized data.

2. Ensure perimeter safety

   Network perimeters draw the line between your local area network (LAN) and the public internet. In
   today’s world, it can be confusing to tell where your LAN ends and the public web begins. Shoring up
   your perimeter’s defenses can help prevent hackers from entering your network via the world wide web.

   Check your perimeter often and keep firewall rules up-to-date to increase the protection of your LAN
   perimeter. Maintaining a detailed, in-depth awareness of which services are running on your network can also
   help you more easily spot invasive devices and software. A network device inventory list should also include
   end users’ personal devices and should follow enterprise network encryption strategies and other
   security measures.

3. Perform training and standardize protocols

   End-user training is one nontechnical method to help improve detection and response to potential security
   issues. This training should cover specific red flags—such as suspicious emails, devices, and other
   network activity—and how to properly report these issues. End-user training should also include how to
   properly use specific network elements, proper password maintenance methods, and other common end-user
   protocols.

   When security issues occur, it’s essential to have the right people in the right place at the right
   time. End-user training should clarify chains of command when it comes to addressing alerts, alarms, and
   security reports. This enables your team to effectively work together, solving problems in an organized
   fashion to avoid confusion.

4. Monitor your network consistently

   Your ability to effectively spot and properly address security issues may involve regularly performing tasks
   like patching, implementing endpoint virus protection, and log collection to help ensure accuracy in your
   security data. Collecting network security monitoring metrics can allow you to better analyze trends and
   support more efficient network intrusion detection.

How does the network monitoring software work in SolarWinds Security Event Manager?

SolarWinds® Security Event Manager (SEM) offers network monitoring with automated features designed to actively flag events found through real-time log correlation. SEM enables you to uncover actionable intelligence on your network cybersecurity, compliance, and daily operations. You can use these critical insights to respond to security threats quickly and efficiently.

With visualization features like trees, graphs, and charts, SEM is designed to instantly highlight important network security data and related issues. This supplies you with the necessary context to make speedy yet informed decisions regarding security operations.

SEM is a network security monitoring tool designed to scan your network using a list of known bad actors based on community-sourced threat intelligence feeds to help you discover the following:

• Internal communications with a potentially malicious host, indicating an already-present security threat
• Attacks, probes, or other communications potentially indicating an incoming network intrusion
• Spam, denial of service, or similar hosts that could be security threats, signaling phishing attempts, or zombies
• System errors and crash reports, which could potentially yield openings for security threats
• Failure of antivirus or anti-malware technology to clean up potential security infections
• Intrusion detection through other security triggers

Along with uncovering potential cybersecurity attacks, SEM can help you start addressing these threats faster. SEM is built to let you enable or disable accounts, detach ransomware USB drives, and shut down entire machines to prevent malicious attackers from wreaking havoc on your network. SEM can also enable alerts and take set actions based on triggers at any time of the day. This allows you to stay focused while still addressing critical issues the moment they arise.

SEM is designed to centralize security data from across your IT environment. This comprehensive view of suspicious and malicious behavior can enable you to understand real-time network security activity so you can appropriately respond to cybersecurity threats without delay.