Protecting Your Office Network Security with Advanced NAC Features

Secure networks have never been so important to businesses as they are in the constantly changing world of cybersecurity today. Special Features of Network Access Control (NAC) for Business Owners and IT Managers to Know: 5 Key Benefits to Boost Your Office Network Security!

In addition to guarding against unauthorized access, advanced NAC capabilities work alongside current security countermeasures to create a comprehensive defense through which threats are constantly reshaped. In this blog, we will look at some of those advanced NAC abilities that can enhance the security of your office setup.

Integration with Depth of Threat Intelligence Feeds

More names to add in Norton’s rival list (AVG, Bitdefender, Kaspersky). Use feeds provided by threat intelligence for better network security protection. Leverages threat feeds — Advanced NAC solutions can ingest these feeds to identify new threats and automatically stop them to provide real-time protection. With real-time updates and feedback on potential security threats, it enables the network administrators to have better information for quicker remediation of vulnerabilities.

Proactive Defense: Threat intelligence feeds can be used to spot unusual behaviors and known vulnerabilities, thus enabling your NAC solution to instantly counteract potential threats.

Customizable Alerts: NAC will notify you about specific types of threats, making your security measures quite accurate.

• Greater Visibility: When your NAC system has access to global threat intelligence, you’ll receive an integrated view of all the alerts specific to your office network.
• This is invaluable for networks that rent network security equipment (e.g., firewalls and routers), because you can always guarantee the devices are current with the latest information to protect your network.

Behavioural Analytics and Anomaly Detection

Advanced and modern NAC solutions offer behavioural analytics and anomaly detection. By monitoring network activities and user behavior, NAC systems are able to immediately recognize illicit behaviors that might be the function of a security breach.

• Anomaly Detection: The system detects unusual user activity that could indicate insider threats or a user account taken over by someone else.
• Anomaly Alerts: Get instant notification of any abnormal activities so you can respond instantly.
• Minimizing False Positives: Machine learning models embedded in the system help to fine-tune detection, which means there are fewer false alerts for the IT teams to lose precious time investigating.

In terms of office network security, this is where behavioural analytics comes into play and acts as an added layer (prevents the very act before it even happens) to strongly secure the entire network.

Automated Mapping Detection, Isolation, and Containment

By adding automated incident response and remediation into your NAC solutions, you are further decreasing the time it takes to respond to and rectify potential security breaches. With the automation of these tasks, companies are getting faster response times if security is compromised.

• Faster Response Times: Automation accelerates the reaction against security threats, eliminating incidents long before they have an opportunity to wreak serious havoc.
• Action Consistency: Automated actions provide the same level of response (applied uniformly), thus reducing human error in security responses.
• Resource Optimization: Automation frees up IT staff to do strategic work, instead of incident management.

This means automatic incident response and remediation provides a guarantee that the assets companies are renting – servers, networking equipment like routers etc. are all continually secure is critical. It can be extended to the profiling of IoT devices and segmentation.

Securing IoT Devices with Device Profiling and Segmentation

Simply put, even offices can be a haven for hackers, with the increasing usage of IoT (Internet of Things) devices at work. To accurately secure your network, you need an advanced NAC system that can perform device profiling and segmentation for IoT devices.

• Device Identification: NAC solutions know how to track down IoT devices on your network and can verify that only permitted devices are connected.
• Network Segmentation: By isolating IoT devices into their own network zones, you can restrict the ability of these devices to communicate directly with important parts of your network, limiting the potential for a compromised device being leveraged in a larger attack.
• Continuous Monitoring: The NAC system continuously monitors IoT devices for anomalous behavior to maintain security.

With the rise in organizations leasing IoT devices, choosing NAC solutions with comprehensive IoT management capabilities can secure these connected devices against possible threats.

Cloud-Based NAC Solutions For Remote Work

With an increase in remote working, cloud-based NAC solutions have become a vital part of keeping the office network secure beyond traditional physical boundaries. These solutions offer the necessary flexibility to authenticate remote connections.

• Sense of Security: With cloud-based NAC, you can easily scale up your remote workforce while ensuring them all great security without any major infrastructure changes.
• Unified Management: Enables centralized control of remote connections to provide consistent security policy implementation on the entire network.
• Adaptable Access Control: You can modify access controls in real-time when using cloud-based solutions using the security posture and location of remote workers.

Distributed companies can have both on-prem and off-prem network equipment to manage, but cloud-based NAC solutions guarantee that the rented firewalls/server/routers are accessible and safe.

Key Takeaways

In the current cyber threat environment, it is more crucial than ever to improve your office network security using NAC. Be it integration with threat intelligence feeds, leveraging behavioural analytics and automated response, dealing with IoT device challenges, or implementing cloud solutions for remote work scenarios – all of these are part of NAC systems and offer a complete wall against multiple security threats.

Equally important, this advanced set of NAC capabilities can yield immense value for businesses which offer rentals network security equipment (firewalls, servers, or routers) so that they are always secure and up-to-date to address the modern complexities around cybersecurity. So it serves the purpose of securing and maintaining a well-run office network, as well as providing increased defense against attacks like this, which is vital to investing in next-generation NAC solutions.