The standalone offering is designed to provide increased security for existing LAN infrastructures, maximising the security level of the current estate without the need for costly hardware upgrades.
Darren Ashcroft, network consultant at Networks First, comments: “The new Advanced LAN Security service will protect against the three major threats: denial of service attacks, unauthorised management access and unauthorised network access. This is implemented by optimising the existing infrastructure and systems to ensure that they do more for the security of the overall network architecture.
“Through undertaking a thorough network security assessment and consultation with the customer to assess their needs and then configuring the existing kit to perform to its full potential, we can protect businesses from these internal threats to their networks and the cost and inconvenience of the resulting downtime.”
With IT budgets tighter than ever, the new service will offer a lifeline to IT directors needing to ‘do more with less’ and is ideally suited to organisations which have to comply with security standards such as the Government Code of Connect (CoCo), the Payment Cards Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or ISO 27001.
According to a recent security survey, approximately 40 percent of all cyber based attacks on internal IT systems originate from sources residing on the internal LAN, demonstrating that LAN security is a critical aspect of the IT security mix and that firewalls offer insufficient protection against such threats.
There are two main elements to the service, which comprises a comprehensive LAN security assessment followed by the implementation of a recommended solution.