As an IT professional, it stands to reason you’ve had plenty of sleepless nights. Since 2013, when the entirety of Yahoo’s customer accounts were compromised (an astounding three billion), cyberattacks have been in the news at an alarming rate and scale. Last year marked a record of over 5.9 billion user records stolen overall.

Now we’re more than halfway through 2022, and ransomware attacks are making headlines as the largest threat today. While President Biden officially made cybersecurity a priority in 2021 with Executive Order 14028, implementing its directives remains a challenge.

Not news to you, right? Nonetheless, 29% of CEOs and CISOs and 40% of CSOs expressed trepidation about their organization’s lack of preparedness for the threat of this rapidly changing landscape, in a recent study by ThoughtLab.

The Importance of Network Security

Keeping sensitive data safe and maintaining a reliable, trustworthy network are vital to cybersecurity. It requires increasing vigilance to keep up with the pace of technological development. Malware, phishing, the dark web, nation-state attacks – it seems like every day there’s a new threat to guard against.

Your network is your first line of defense, and to develop a viable perimeter, you must accurately assess its weaknesses. Following the one-year anniversary of the aforementioned cybersecurity executive order, these widespread obstacles were noted in Covington’s review.

• Challenges keeping up with rapidly changing technology
• Patterns of reactive responses rather than proactive prevention
• Difficulty training employees to use the cybersecurity technology

What do these issues have in common? Human error. When it comes to network security, while the CIA triad (confidentiality, integrity, and availability) is common knowledge among IT professionals, even security leaders sometimes discount the role of human susceptibility. Not surprisingly, ongoing research has found:

“Cybercriminals usually exploit users with a lack of digital/cyber ethics or who are poorly trained in addition to technical vulnerabilities to reach their goals.”

Frontiers in Computer Science

Now the question remains…

What Are the Most Common Threats?

While both involve human error, it’s important to recognize the difference between data leaks versus data breaches. The former are accidental in nature, whereas the latter involve intentional hacking. Both have dire consequences. Here are a few common types of cybercrime spanning both:

• Software-Related Foibles: Whether its accidental (misconfiguration, poor design, or simply inherent application vulnerability) or malicious (malware/ ransomware), software often serves as a gateway for cybercriminals.
• Socially Engineered Theft: Commonly known as phishing, these schemes require hackers to establish trust to obtain sensitive personal data
• Firewall and Operating System Issues: Due to the rapid evolution of cybercrime, if these are not constantly updated, they quickly become not only obsolete, but rather, another area of vulnerability to exploitation.

You already know those three categories represent a very high-level overview. Within each, disruption can take many forms. As with anything else, the difficulty’s in the details…

Serenity Now! How SD-WAN Can Help

With so much to keep watch over, security leaders may be wondering if they’ll ever draw a deep breath again. Don’t despair – with a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) provided by the right technology partner, it’s not only possible, but also the expectation.

Although it’s impossible to altogether remove the human vulnerability, we can certainly protect ourselves by building better boundaries.

SD-WAN enables the convergence of networking and security so applications can be delivered free of added exposures. A Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) allows you to integrate your network with security functions (such as Firewall as a Service, Cloud Access Security Broker, Secure Web Gateway, and Zero Trust Network Access), so you receive a unified service. This way, solutions can be directly embedded into the network, allowing them to be closer to where the applications are hosted, thereby enhancing overall performance.

Extreme Networks delivers SD-WAN that addresses security concerns while enabling you to optimize your total cost of ownership and get your site up and running fast.

In need of serenity now? We’ll make it happen. Here’s how:

• We leverage advanced networking technology and deliver it as a cloud service, so it’s always up-to-date.
• Our cloud-based firewall as a service and secure web gateway deployment provides unified orchestration, so there’s no need to implement a physical next-generation firewall onsite
• You can securely connect all users to apps – regardless of their location and technology – thanks to advanced security capabilities.
• Your foundation can be built to match your security needs and future demands in mind, so you can grow with confidence.

We cultivated the right relationship, so we’re ready to be there for you.

Our Partnership with Check Point

While reducing latency and improving overall user experience is the goal, achieving this through the common method of connecting your offices to the cloud via a local internet breakout can create network vulnerability.

Check Point addresses this issue by securing all links and delivering advanced threat prevention. In combination with SD-WAN, Check Point ensures performance and security. Not only that, it simplifies deployment and improves cost efficiency.

Secure site-to-site and site-to-cloud connection are easy and optimal when you have ExtremeCloud SD-WAN. That’s why we’ve partnered to offer EdgeSentry to integrate ExtremeCloud SD-WAN with the Advanced Threat Protection platform from Check Point. Not only does it detect threats, but it also prevents them through file quarantine and inspection stopping malware and infections from reaching your branch networks. And thanks to the subscription-based model, capacity scales with you as your business develops.

Ready to learn how Extreme Networks can help you sleep better at night? It’s all in our eBook,

The Case for SD-WAN: Optimizing Today’s Digital Network.