What customers told us about their networks

On Monday, I wrote about the need to keep corporate networks “healthy” – operating at peak efficiency, free from the ravages of unknown systems and infected machines. I said that a healthy network ensures greater productivity, higher customer satisfaction, and profitability.

We talked to IT managers about network health, and they told us that their priority is to efficiently deliver more network access to more users in more ways. They also told us that they had real concerns about how to do that safely, securely, and while preserving the integrity of their network. How, they wondered, could they ensure the health of their networks while at the same time enabling greater access? There was real concern around maintaining network integrity in the face of highly mobile laptop users, wireless networks, and guests bringing unknown threats into the network.

When pressed for an opinion, very few IT managers said they were confident about overall health of their network, exactly who was on their wired and wireless networks, and the state of health of each machine connected to their network. Despite universal anti-virus use, almost every IT manager we spoke to spent time fighting security incidents ranging from the trivial to the alarming. The possibility of spyware or rogue devices stealing customer data, especially personally identifiable information (PII) and other intellectual property was repeated often as an area of worry. IT managers in smaller businesses, especially, lacked faith in the newer aspects of wireless network security.

What did we learn most from these conversations with IT managers? We learned that while most IT managers were aware their networks may be unhealthy in parts, they lacked an effective and affordable way to bring their networks back to a healthy state. Almost every IT manager admitted that enforcing security policy on the individual desktop felt like a nearly impossible task.

Listening to the frustrations of these IT managers, I was reminded of one of the most important lessons I took from my experience at WatchGuard: network security solutions must be easy to use and manage, otherwise they just add to the complexity and risk. Effective solutions cannot require that the IT manager be an expert in every detail of network security: the solution must have “built-in” expertise that can aid the IT manager through new, and difficult issues. One other lesson: Looking to the security solutions developed for the larger Fortune 500 enterprise usually only revealed complex, expensive solutions that required highly skilled IT staff to install and operate.

So, is it possible to make network health easy to achieve – even for smaller companies with limited network security resources and IT staff? Can a network health solution be designed that enables IT managers to enforce a network health standard that isolates dangerous or unknown systems and guests, while still granting some limited network access? Can a network health solution be designed to be affordable? Can network health be assured without requiring disruptive network changes?

We think the answer to these questions is “yes!” Our goal at Napera is to make network health easy to achieve and maintain for even the smallest company.