Network Security

Network security is a complicated subject, historically only tackled by well-trained and experienced experts. However, as more and more people become connected, an increasing number of people need to understand the basics of security in a networked world.

It's very important to understand that in security, it is not adequate to ask "what's the best firewall and anti-virus?'' There are two extremes - absolute security and absolute access. The closest to an absolutely secure machine is one unplugged from the network, power supply, locked in a safe, and thrown at the bottom of the sea, unfortunately this isn't a useful machine. A machine with absolute access is extremely convenient to use, it's simply there, and will do whatever you tell it, without question, authorisation, passwords, or any other mechanism. This isn't practical, either, the Internet is a bad neighbourhood now, and it isn't long before some bonehead will tell the computer to do something like self-destruct, after which, it isn't terribly useful to you.

We constantly make decisions about what risks we're willing to accept. Every organisation or computer user needs to decide where between the two extremes of total security and total access they need to be. A policy needs to articulate this, and then define how that will be enforced with practices and such. Everything that is done in the name of security, then, must enforce that policy uniformly.

We can help to provide advise on security and implement policies to provide you with a secure computing environment.