The point is to understand the purpose of a network

What’s the Purpose?

To begin protecting anything, one needs to know what to protect. One way to think about a network is to consider its purpose first. Understanding the network at a conceptual level is the first task.

What kind of business are we dealing with? A bank will have different types of data flowing between machines than a real estate company. Knowing the business, its purpose, and, ultimately, its requirements will help us understand the purpose of the network.

In the world of computer networking, anything of value starts with data. Computer data is anything digitally stored. Networks exist to transmit or transfer data between computers and, ultimately, between people.

How is Data Flowing?

Knowing the network’s purpose, we can then begin to draft an idea of what critical data is likely to be moving on the network. This might be bank transactions, PII, internal communications between the C-Suite, etc. From here, we can begin to think about what kind of servers, operating systems, segmentation of the networks, etc. might be needed to help facilitate the flow of data.

If the network is already deployed, thinking about the business functions can help guide us in determining criticality and how data should be protected.

As we consider the business needs and purpose of the network and the kinds of data flowing between users/machines/the Internet, we can now consider protections.

How to Protect Data?

Two main tools/ideas that can directly impact protecting network data are understanding Baselines and Data Loss Prevention (DLP). Baselines are used to identify normal behavior and activity on the network. Anything that deviates from this baseline is abnormal and should be investigated. Data Loss Prevention is a gigantic undertaking that requires classifying all the data on the network. However, done with patience and care, this can significantly boost critical data protection.

This is by no means exhaustive, but at the very least, I hope it gets you thinking in the right direction.