Secure your business with CyberHoot Today!!!
A Local Area Network (LAN) is a group of devices connected together in one physical location, such as a building, office, or home. A LAN can be small or large, ranging from a home network with one user to an enterprise network with thousands of users and devices in an office or school. Regardless of size, a LAN’s single defining characteristic is that it connects devices that are in a single, limited area. In contrast, a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) or Wide Area Network (WAN) covers larger and larger geographic areas respectively. Some WANs and MANs connect numerous LANs together.
A LAN contains cables, access points, switches, routers, and other components that enable devices to connect to internal servers, web servers, and other LANs through wide area networks. The rise of virtualization has fueled the development of virtual LANs, which enable network administrators to logically group network nodes and separate their networks without a need for major infrastructure changes.
For example, in an office with multiple departments, such as accounting, IT support, and administration, each department’s computers could be logically connected to the same switch but segmented to behave as if they are separate networks with limited or no knowledge of each other depending upon the need.
What does this mean for an SMB?
However, for larger SMB’s, you should consider network segmentation between office locations and potentially within an office between discrete business groups such as Account, Finance, development, and support (in addition to trusted and guest Wi-Fi). In the end network segmentation is a powerful tool to slow hackers down in compromising your entire network and sinking your business.
Additional Cybersecurity Recommendations
Additionally, these recommendations below will help you and your business stay secure with the various threats you may face on a day-to-day basis. All of the suggestions listed below can be gained by hiring CyberHoot’s vCISO Program development services.
- Govern employees with policies and procedures. You need a password policy, an acceptable use policy, an information handling policy, and a written information security program (WISP) at a minimum.
- Train employees on how to spot and avoid phishing attacks. Adopt a Learning Management system like CyberHoot to teach employees the skills they need to be more confident, productive, and secure.
- Test employees with Phishing attacks to practice. CyberHoot’s Phish testing allows businesses to test employees with believable phishing attacks and put those that fail into remedial phish training.
- Deploy critical cybersecurity technology including two-factor authentication on all critical accounts. Enable email SPAM filtering, validate backups, deploy DNS protection, antivirus, and anti-malware on all your endpoints.
- In the modern Work-from-Home era, make sure you’re managing personal devices connecting to your network by validating their security (patching, antivirus, DNS protections, etc) or prohibiting their use entirely.
- If you haven’t had a risk assessment by a 3rd party in the last 2 years, you should have one now. Establishing a risk management framework in your organization is critical to addressing your most egregious risks with your finite time and money.
- Buy Cyber-Insurance to protect you in a catastrophic failure situation. Cyber-Insurance is no different than Car, Fire, Flood, or Life insurance. It’s there when you need it most.
All of these recommendations are built into CyberHoot the product or CyberHoot’s vCISO Services. With CyberHoot you can govern, train, assess, and test your employees. Visit CyberHoot.com and sign up for our services today. At the very least continue to learn by enrolling in our monthly Cybersecurity newsletters to stay on top of current cybersecurity updates.
To learn more about Local Area Networks (LAN), watch this short 2-minute video:
CyberHoot does have some other resources available for your use. Below are links to all of our resources, feel free to check them out whenever you like:
- Blog
- Cybrary (Cyber Library)
- Infographics
- Newsletters
- Press Releases
- Instructional Videos (HowTo) – very helpful for our SuperUsers!
Note: If you’d like to subscribe to our newsletter, visit any link above (besides infographics) and enter your email address on the right-hand side of the page, and click ‘Send Me Newsletters’.