What Is Network Security Management?

While the number and severity of threats to enterprise networks continue to increase, network security teams find themselves overwhelmed with the administration and management of security across the enterprise. This is especially true for network administrators who manage large numbers of complex security tools and firewalls, each with its own policies and practices, knowing that a single misconfiguration can lead to network vulnerabilities. In fact, according to Gartner, firewall misconfigurations will cause 99% of all firewall breaches through 2023. ¹

Network security management is the practice of managing the firewalls and policies to prevent and monitor access across the network. But separately managing each firewall and security tool creates several issues:

1. The chances of human error are high, leading to vulnerabilities in the network.

2. The process of managing each firewall in security deployment is repetitive, time-consuming, and can burn out network administrators.

3. Firewall security policies that haven’t been updated in years often conflict with each other, which exposes the network to threats. 

4. Network configuration changes are often manual and cannot be automated.

A centralized network security management solution can manage configuration and security across a handful to thousands of firewalls and offers visibility into the entire network from a single console. 

Why does your security team need a centralized network security solution?

1. You get full visibility into firewalls, users, applications, content, traffic, logs and threats – all in one place. You can see what applications the users access across the entire network and get actionable insights into network threats. 

2. Your job of configuring, deploying and managing security policies becomes simplified. You can configure and deploy security policies to any and all firewalls, reducing repetitive and manual tasks. 

3. You only need to maintain a single console – for single-pane-of-glass management – not hundreds of firewalls and security tools.  

4. A centralized solution can uncover unknown threats hiding in your network in real time, turning your network security team into proactive threat hunters.

5. You can quickly propagate changes across the enterprise.

6. You save hundreds of hours, which leads to massive cost savings.

Related Video

Learn how Palo Alto Networks manages network security. 

^{1 Technology Insight for Network Security Policy Management, Gartner Research, February 2019,
https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3902564/technology-insight-for-network-security-policy-managemen.}