Since the COVID-19 pandemic burst into our lives, many things have changed and forced us to adapt to the new rules of the global pandemic. The most noticeable change happened in our professional lives, and most of us started to work remotely without knowing remote work will be prevalent among all sizes of businesses in the upcoming years.
Due to the rising number of remote employees, businesses’ corporate networks become more complicated and hard to protect as remotely working employees connect to corporate networks in different geo-locations, creating dispensed endpoints in corporate networks.
As businesses’ work environments became more decentralized, cybercriminals took advantage of weak end-points in corporate networks and used these as gateways to gain unauthorized access to corporate networks and perform their malicious goals. That’s why, since remote work models came into practice, there has been a dramatic increase in cyber crimes. Additionally, in the following years, experts predict that cyber crimes will grow by 15 percent per year, and total global cybercrime damages will reach 10 trillion USD yearly.
For this reason, now all sizes of businesses should improve their cybersecurity posture, and implement modern security solutions to safeguard all of their corporate assets against cyber criminals. When necessary cyber security actions aren’t taken, results of data breaches or cyber-attacks can be disastrous, and leave your business to deal with monetary costs coming from regulatory entities. Additionally, these kinds of incidents harm customers’ trust in your business.
To avoid these outcomes, VPNs and IP management systems have become indispensable and necessary security solutions. Implementation of these solutions can help your business establish robust network security and secure remote access. Additionally, these solutions can improve security in so many ways, and help your business prevent unauthorized users from gaining illegitimate access to your corporate networks, data, and resources. Before diving into the top four features of IP management systems, let’s explain what is an IP management system.
What Is an IP Management System?
IP management systems are widely used among all sizes of businesses to create and manage a list of whitelist IP addresses to enable secure remote access. These systems are usually used along with enterprise VPNs, and allow businesses to have static IP addresses or create a list of whitelist IP addresses to provide access to corporate networks, resources, and data. Additionally, IP management systems help you to efficiently monitor your network accessibility, replace constant authentication procedures, and manage access privileges to your business servers and databases.
In essence, IP allowlisting is a cybersecurity method that allows IT administrators to set static IP addresses or create a list of authorized IP addresses for a business and allow access to corporate networks, resources, and data from predefined IP addresses only. The logic behind this technique is simple: employees who request access to corporate resources from whitelist IP addresses are permitted access, while employees who request access from unlisted IP addresses are restricted to access.
Simply put, whitelist IP addresses or static IP addresses are distinctive factors for defining who is allowed to access and who isn’t. In this regard, IP management systems allow businesses to control access through whitelist IP addresses or static IP addresses and see who is accessing from where.
Network access control and secure remote access are the most important benefits of IP management systems. Additionally, these benefits mitigate the risks of unauthorized access to corporate networks, resources, and data, and improve security across all corporate assets, including cloud environments. Lastly, VPNs and IP management systems are an essential part of cyber security postures, and they enable robust security.
Features of an IP Management System
1. Network Monitoring and Reporting
A reputable IP management system has network monitoring and reporting features that allow businesses to continually monitor the devices, servers, websites, and whitelist IP addresses. Constant monitoring enables real-time data on the availability of every server and network center. This feature allows businesses to have greater visibility of their IP management systems and their health. This way, businesses can prevent downtime from happening. Additionally, an IP management system enables detailed reporting which shows data on network usage, connectivity, IP address distribution, and so on. So, reporting allows businesses to scale up tasks.
2. Role-Based Management
Within an organization, there can be hundreds or a dozen of employees, and each of these employees has different roles and status. Employees shouldn’t have unlimited control over the corporate networks, and IP management systems allow businesses to assign roles and control privileges according to employees’ roles within the organization.
This way, businesses can distribute workloads to more employees rather than a few expert-level administrators. Additionally, the role-based management feature is quite handy for mitigating internal security risks because each employee can’t access and control anything outside their job roles and tasks. For instance, an IT admin can control a few subnets, and can’t reach or make changes in other subnets of a corporate network.
3. Domain Name Service (DNS) Management
A good IP management system usually includes a Domain Name Service (DNS) management feature. But, some IP management systems don’t include this feature, in these cases, these systems are constructed to be compatible with DNS management and they enable integration. DNS management is critical for sustaining corporate servers and zones. That’s why adequate DNS management is required, and this way IT administrators can update DNS servers as IP addresses modifications happen over time or new devices are added to the corporate network.
4. Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) Management
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is one of the most important components of the network space. A reputable IP management system should enable the DHCP management feature or at least it should be compatible with it. DHCP is a network management protocol that allows IT administrators to assign static and dynamic IP addresses to the devices within the corporate perimeter.
This way, IT administrators can automatically assign IP addresses, and this eliminates the requirement for configuration of network devices and assigning IP addresses manually. In this regard, the DHCP management feature is quite handy and useful, and it reduces the time, money, and labor that was previously spent on the manual configuration of devices and assigning IP addresses.
Last Remarks
In our modern world, all sizes of businesses are up against increased risks of cyber attacks. To safeguard your business and all corporate assets, your business needs modern security solutions. In this regard, enterprise VPNs and IP management systems can help you improve network security, and enable secure remote access. A good IP management system should have network monitoring, role-based management, DNS, and DHCP integration features.