Balancing Network Security Requirements

The overall security challenge is to find a balance between two important needs: open networks to support evolving business requirements and freedom-of-information initiatives versus the protection of private, personal, and strategic business information.
Security has moved to the forefront of network management and implementation. The survival of many businesses depends on allowing open access to network resources and ensuring that data and resources are as secure as possible. The escalating importance of e-business and the need for private data to traverse potentially unsafe public networks both increase the need for the development and implementation of a corporate-wide network security policy. Establishing a network security policy should be the first step in changing a network over to a secure infrastructure.

The Internet has created expectations for a company to build stronger relationships with customers, suppliers, partners, and employees. E-business challenges companies to become more agile and competitive. The benefit of this challenge is that new applications for e-commerce, supply chain management, customer care, workforce optimization, and e-learning have been created. These applications streamline and improve processes, lowering costs while increasing turnaround times and user satisfaction.

As enterprise network managers open their networks to more users and applications, they also expose the networks to greater risks. The result has been an increase in business security requirements. Security must be included as a fundamental component of any e-business strategy.

E-business requires mission-critical networks that can accommodate ever-increasing constituencies and ever-increasing demands on capacity and performance. These networks also need to handle voice, video, and data traffic as networks converge into multiservice environments.