Network Security Automation Improves Efficiency For Your System Admin
Today marks System Administrator Appreciation Day — the day to thank your network system administrators for their tireless efforts to keep our workplaces running and our data secure. While sys admins are the public face of IT and enjoy the (much-deserved) limelight on this day, their network admin brethren are sometimes overlooked. Their work is no less important, as today’s networks are more complex than ever thanks to environments that span cloud and hybrid settings, a diverse array of network infrastructure vendors, and the ongoing talent shortage in both IT and security industries.
To show your appreciation and to help make your network administrators’ lives easier beyond just today, organizations should look to adopt network security automation tools that will save time, resources and headaches in a few key ways:
- Strengthen network security – As the threat landscape evolves constantly, new and advanced attacks are constantly threatening networks. Compounded by network complexity, network administrators are under more pressure than ever to deliver service and maintain a secure posture. With network security automation, admins are able to automate critical tasks such as disaster recovery and backups, OS upgrades, patch and vulnerability management, remediation and attack surface management.
- Remove human error – Automating network security is not only good for increasing security posture, but it can also mitigate the security risk caused by human error. With the ongoing security and IT talent shortage, manual processes coupled with smaller teams means errors are easily introduced, patch management falls behind, and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with best practices for routine backups.
- Time saving – With network security automation, many of the routine but critical management procedures become scheduled and automated, providing organizations with peace of mind and saving time for network administrators to focus on high priority tasks. A task may be as simple as adding or removing an administrator from devices, or as elaborate as performing complex automated upgrades or hotfixes to multiple devices with the single click of a mouse.
While system administrators keep the machines running, network admins keep the information moving smoothly and securely from one machine to another, and in this connected age that is just as important. We should all be thankful to have them on our teams and do what we can to ensure their success. Organizations should leverage tools that not only make the lives of network administrators easier, but also ensure the continuous improvement of network security posture.
