Operate Your Network on a “Need-to-Know Basis”

If a company neglects network security, they’ll quickly find their network inundated with threats. However, if you fail to protect your business from internal problems as well, you might have a whole other monster on your hands. Some businesses have encountered this problem when employees access certain documents and then accidentally misplace or delete them, causing damage that your organization was not particularly prepared for.

The fast food industry is a primary example of how the principle of least privilege can be applied to the business world. The fast food restaurant can be split into three different types of employees: cashiers, managers, and food prep workers. Cashiers obviously need access to the drawers in order to fulfill their position. Managers require access to them so they can count the drawers and record the day’s profits. Aside from cross training, the average food preparation employee doesn’t need to get into the drawers; therefore, they aren’t allowed to do so.

The principle of least privilege operates this way. Users are restricted from accessing certain information, depending on what their job role is and what they need to get their hands on. This isn’t normally done out of a lack of trust, but more as a preventative measure that’s required in order to minimize the potential for threatening situations. This is generally done by putting up extra layers of user-level security, or an external program or piece of hardware.

As you might imagine, the fewer users who have permission to access certain files, the more secure they are from external threat factors. Therefore, the most important thing to consider when limiting access to files is whether or not your team can get by without accessing certain information. It should be mentioned that, regardless of security measures taken, no solution is perfect. This is why it’s always in your business’s best interests to leverage security best practices for your benefit.

Ferrum Technology Services knows how to restrict access to particular parts of your network on a user-by-user basis. With our monitoring service, we can even take detailed audits of network access records, traffic, login attempts, and more. This makes it simple to watch out for suspicious activity within your company.

However, even a comprehensive network security solution is often not enough to protect your business from all manners of threats. Despite imposing minimal user permissions, threats still manage to find their way into networks regardless. This is why your business needs to be prepared to handle threats from all sources. This is what makes our Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution such a valuable investment. It takes an enterprise-level firewall, antivirus, spam blocking, and content filtering solution and packages them into one comprehensive network security powerhouse.

If you’re ready to protect yourself from both internal and external threat factors, give us a call at (847) 697-3282.