Network object management is crucial for the secure operation of multi-cloud network environments. There’s no reason a company can’t reach 100 percent network efficiency and performance if it achieves 100 percent accuracy with network object management, potentially through monitoring tools and automation.
Many companies have yet to understand the implementation of new security standards since application management and data privacy requirements change frequently. The task becomes even more challenging when managing objects in a multivendor security network. Every vendor has its own management platform, which sometimes causes network security administrators to declare objects numerous times, leading to a counter-effect.
This can be a waste of important resources and result in workload bottlenecks. It also introduces naming inconsistencies and a slew of unexpected errors, resulting in security risks and connectivity issues. This raises the question of whether enterprises are doing enough to ensure that network objects in legacy and greenfield settings are synced.
Network Object Management
Poor network object management can bury a company’s IT and security managers in productivity bottlenecks and trivial workloads. Inconsistent or improper naming of network objects can cause a seemingly endless amount of issues for an organization, ranging from connectivity issues to security flaws that aren’t visible. Poor network object management, in this case, could be one of the most significant “insider threats” to a company’s overall cybersecurity efforts. When object names are paired incorrectly with a specific security policy because of inconsistent naming, everything will appear to be fine on paper until a breach occurs, and even then, finding the vulnerability may be difficult.
Also Read: Managing Identity in a Hybrid and Multi-Cloud World
This is why proactive and intelligent network object management is such an important part of a multi-cloud strategy. Organizations may just need to name things like IP addresses, servers, and groups of related objects to which very simple security rules can be implemented on a fundamental level. However, when a company expands, it tends to accumulate a large number of network objects, perhaps in the tens of thousands. Even a dedicated team of security and IT professionals would struggle to keep track of and update such a massive number of items, and errors due to avoidable human error would skyrocket. It’s simple to understand how a manual or outdated method of identifying network objects could go awry – and they do.
The Need for Network Object Management in a Multicloud Approach
Objects on the network, such as groups of IP addresses or servers, must be named to be included in the policies that apply to them for network security policies to work successfully. One of the most challenging aspects of multi-cloud solutions is that enterprises often use network traffic-filtering solutions from several cloud vendors. Each solution will typically have its own vendor-specific platform, requiring network and security administrators to define network objects many times. This wastes time that could be better spent elsewhere in the company and leads to costly blunders and security flaws.
Additionally, this opens the door to another issue: name duplication. On a small scale, a team that knows what to look for can readily rectify this. However, for larger enterprises, name duplication can quickly escalate into a much more serious issue. It’s not rare for two copies with the same name to have two different definitions.
It’s always a good idea to have a set of maintenance rules in place to assist organizations in improving their cyber hygiene.
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