Your data is one of the most valuable resources an organisation possesses and yet all too often it is poorly protected from external or even internal access.
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An organisation’s data is one of its most valuable assets and yet the security in place is often woefully inadequate. ITD place great emphasis on Network Security and will help you protect your organisation from both external and internal security breaches
When thinking about Network Security, one tends to immediately consider the attack of your network from external sources, however Internal Security can put you at just as much, if not greater risk. External attacks may well be are casual or opportunistic; but Internal security lapses may be specifically informed or motivated.
At the most basic level, security of data is the stability and protection of data from degradation and corruption. One cannot always stop some form of corruption occurring, however one can mitigate against this occurrence by ensuring that a bullet-proof backup regime is in place. Furthermore, it is essential that regular test Restoration of data from backups is carried out to ensure that the process is working properly.
How many people are aware of the main Administrator password on your server? Often this information is common knowledge. This means that anyone with this information can access most of the data held on the server, whether they are authorised to or not. Alternatively, the user may be an enthusiastic amateur – without proper protection of key passwords, great damage can accidentally be done to data, programmes and services, quite unintentionally!
There may also be a concern that saving confidential data on the main server, whilst protecting the data by ensuring it is backed up regularly, may allow access to the information by unauthorised individuals. ITD can create confidential folders on the server which can only be accessed by the authorised user when accessing it from a machine signed in under their password-protected user name.
One of the most likely causes of network security breaches is due to virus attack whereby a virus infects a machine and either corrupts stored data or gathers confidential information and emails it as well as user names and passwords to an external source.
ITD will ensure that all servers and workstations are properly set up so that appropriate files are checked or blocked where possible and that fully automated updates of virus definitions are propagated throughout the network.
Irritating in itself as well as the largest source of virus-infection, spam email can be the bane of an email user’s life. The continual evolution and sophistication of spam emails as well as their sheer volume can easily overwhelm a server’s processing power as well as taking up valuable disk space.
ITD recommend implementing external spam-filtering services whereby email is filtered by an external server first before even entering your own Exchange server. Such external anti-spam solutions are effective because they have significant on-going investment in spam detection as it evolves and as such mail is stopped prior to reaching your own servers, there is less valuable disk space and less server processing resource used and as such services also include virus-detection, many viruses do not even enter your network in the first place.
Permanent internet connections such as ADSL, SDSL and Leased Lines are now essential for many organisations, and yet at the same time, they provide a permanent access point to your network from the outside and with the increased requirement for remote working, you cannot simply stop all incoming connections.
ITD will provide a firewall and router configuration to stop any unauthorised access to your network whilst facilitating remote access for those authorised to do so (which may include our own engineers for carrying out remote support).
ITD can arrange automatic checking of network integrity and penetration at both server and workstation level. Furthermore, where appropriate, ITD can arrange for thorough network security checking using ethical hacking methods for penetration testing.