If your organization has poor network security causing network vulnerabilities, it can lead to cyberattacks.
Cyberattacks and data breaches often create detrimental consequences, including lost customers and revenue, damaged business reputations, and compromised sensitive data, all of which can lead to legal ramifications caused by non-compliance.
Your organization may not be able to survive these attacks. For this reason, network edge monitoring will help improve network security and prevent vulnerabilities.
Understanding the best practices for network edge monitoring will help improve network security and prevent security attacks from disrupting your business.
COEO understands the importance of network security and has helped thousands of organizations enhance their security by monitoring and securing the network edge with solutions like SASE.
We want you to understand the best practices for network edge monitoring so you can ensure that your network edge is secure.
By the end of this article, you will understand what network edge monitoring is, the best practices for network edge monitoring, and whether it is an appropriate solution for your organization.
What is network edge monitoring?
A network edge is an area where a device, such as a computer or phone, or a local network interfaces with the internet. It is also a security boundary where security solutions like firewalls are placed to keep networks safe from malicious sources.
All the devices in your network, such as computers, phones, printers, etc., will typically connect through your network to a firewall. The firewall will reside at your network edge and act as a barrier for the network.
Edge monitoring collects and analyzes logs and metrics from edge workloads and devices. It is important to monitor the edge of your network to observe the performance of your devices and edge security.
If your organization does not actively monitor its network edge, performance issues can affect your technology, resulting in device failures, high latency, and security breaches.
Security breaches that begin on the edge device can remain undetected until they evolve into larger attacks, and by that point, it is often too late to prevent the problem. Network edge monitoring helps teams get in front of these issues so they identify and mitigate breaches at the edge before they become large attacks.
If you would like to speak with our team to learn more about network edge monitoring and its best practices, you can schedule an appointment.
Network edge monitoring best practices
Network edge monitoring is appropriate for many organizations to improve network security and prevent vulnerabilities. Network security vulnerabilities are something that many organizations struggle with.
However, understanding network edge monitoring best practices will enable you to identify the most effective way to monitor your edge security. The best practices for network edge monitoring include:
Standardize network logs and metrics
It is important to standardize network logs and metrics as much as possible to ensure you have consistent data. This will help your team monitor them efficiently as well as make it easier for monitoring tools to read and detect changes in the data.
Collect network edge-specific monitoring data
While data on standard logs and metrics are important, it is also important to collect data on the network edge. Additionally, it is important to track data on network edge devices and edge security.
Centralized cloud monitoring
Centralizing and monitoring data in the cloud can also be beneficial. Data is processed more easily here because of the cloud’s resource-rich servers.
When monitoring the network edge, changes in data must be detected in real-time, and latency cannot be tolerated. For this reason, centralizing cloud monitoring can help you monitor your network more easily.
Monitor the network edge in real-time
Monitoring the network edge in real-time is the only effective way to mitigate threats that require immediate responses.
Typically, monitoring data in batches is often more practical than monitoring in real-time. Monitoring data in batches uses fewer resources and is a more feasible approach when working with edge devices that are not continuously reachable over the network.
Develop incident response plans
Monitoring the network edge is not effective if there are no incident response plans in place when a threat to the network edge is identified. However, when creating these incident response plans, it is important to include edge workloads in your plan.
Incident response plans that do not address the edge of the network will be ineffective for monitoring and mitigating threats at the edge of the network.
If your incident response plan assumes that all devices and data are accessed from a data center, it is also ineffective for monitoring the edge of the network.
Is network edge monitoring appropriate for your organization?
Now you understand what network edge monitoring is and the best practices for network edge monitoring. However, it is also important to understand whether network edge monitoring is appropriate for your organization.
If your organization operates in a remote or hybrid work environment with edge devices like cellphones and laptops accessing the company network from various remote locations, network edge monitoring may be beneficial to prevent network security vulnerabilities.
However, while most data is stored in the cloud in some capacity, if your organization does not centralize cloud monitoring, edge monitoring may not be appropriate.
Determining whether edge monitoring is appropriate for your organization
Now you understand what network edge monitoring is, the best practices to use for edge monitoring, and whether edge monitoring is appropriate for your organization. This will help you determine if you should invest the time, money, and resources to monitor the edge of your network.
Network security is important in today’s evolving virtual world. If you have gaps and vulnerabilities in your network security, it will result in cyberattacks and data breaches that cause detrimental consequences.
Damaged business reputations, compromised data, legal consequences, lost customers, and revenue are all consequences of cyberattacks and data breaches that are detrimental to your organization.
It is important to understand what network edge monitoring is and its best practices so you can determine whether it can improve network security and help avoid cyberattacks and data breaches.
COEO understands how important network security is and has helped thousands of organizations with edge monitoring and delivered thousands of network security solutions like SASE to improve their network security.
If you would like to speak with our team to learn more about network edge monitoring and its best practices, you can schedule an appointment.
Now that you understand what network edge monitoring is and its best practices, check out this article to learn about Security Service Edge (SSE) and whether it would be beneficial for your organization:
