NETWORK HARDENING

A fine line lies between network design and network hardening. The line often gets blurred by vendors and technology writers (like us). There’s no definitive agreement on where design ends and hardening begins. Some experts don’t even see a difference between the two processes. For the sake of everyone’s semantic sanity, we’re going to start by clarifying what we mean by design and hardening. Network design is about deciding what you want your network to do. The design process involves choosing which network services to provide, and creating a network infrastructure to support those services. Good network design provides the foundation of a secure network. The quality of the design also affects efficiency, productivity, speed, longevity, and maintenance needs.

Network hardening is the other side of the coin—it’s about making sure a network only does what it was designed to do—and nothing else. Hardening involves using a combination of tools and techniques that can control access to services and protect machines that can’t effectively protect themselves. The fact that networks are “hardened” doesn’t mean that they start like Jell-O. A well-designed network is actually pretty solid and difficult to attack. Network hardening is much more like hardening steel, a process that makes something already strong even stronger.
In practice, network design and design decisions affect the choices available for hardening, and hardening technologies have direct implications on network design. For example, adding a hardening device to a network might require a change to the network topology. The new topology might affect the functionality of other hardening devices, which could prompt a network redesign.