The Five Most Important Reasons to Perform Network Auditing
Network auditing plays a key role in
the ongoing management and maintenance of your information systems. A
proper network auditing program can help to maintain your systems
security and your knowledge of what’s running on your network. It can
also keep you from running afoul of any licensing issues. Here are the
five most important reasons to perform network auditing :
- Vulnerabilities
Use network auditing to assess the security of your systems and
identify vulnerabilities. These can include unapproved services, weak or
blank passwords, or open shares, and can be used to assess both
workstations and servers. Identifying these issues is that first
critical step towards remediating them.
- Patch Management
Network auditing can play a key role in your patch management efforts
as well. Use your network auditing reports both to identify those
systems that need to be patched and also to confirm that patches have
been deployed successfully.
- Hardware Inventory
Network auditing can help you maintain an up-to-date inventory of all
the hardware on your network so you know exactly what you have and can
therefore enable you to easily make hardware related decisions, such as
which systems are getting old and need to be updated to keep up with
the ever increasing work load. Periodic hardware inventories can also be
useful for security, as in the case of unauthorized devices such as
rouge access points which can be a serious red flag that warrant
immediate attention.
- Software Inventory
Speaking of software, knowing what is running on your workstations
and servers is just as important as knowing what hardware is running.
How many XP machines still need to be upgraded? Who is still running
Office 2003 or hasn’t updated their PDF reader since 2009? Network
auditing can give you a clear and complete view into what software is
installed on your workstations and servers so you know just what you
have, what needs to be patched, and…
- Compliance
…what licenses you need. One of the most useful things network
auditing can assist you with is your compliance activities. You can
quickly and easily ensure that all systems are compliant with your
internal policies, and can also be sure that you have licenses for all
the software in use on your network. Too often companies find out only
too late that an open share enabled everyone in the company to install
software that was only licensed for one or two users, and have to
scramble to true up.
Network auditing may sound like an arduous task but, with the right
tools and the right approach, it can be an easy to perform and critical
aspect of your network management. If you are not yet performing regular
network auditing, use these five important reasons to convince
management it’s time to start.
This guest post was provided by Casper Manes on behalf of GFI Software Ltd
for Cyberarms.wordpress.com GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for
network administrators to address their network security, content
security and messaging needs. Read more on the importance of network auditing .
All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Very Good Information Shared.Keep it up.
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