New Security Standards and the Need for Network Discovery

Given the recently updated NIST Security Controls document (NIST 800-53) and the revision to SANS’ Twenty Critical Controls for Effective Cyber Defense, Lumeta believes that we’re seeing the increasing standardization of Network Discovery/Visibility.

Both of these standards call for accurate device and connection inventories, active monitoring, proactive network audits of configurations, devices, address space and perimeters to validate security controls across the network. This increased focus in understanding the true and current state of the network as it pertains to active discovery is what Lumeta has been evangelizing for nearly a decade.

More and more organizations are recognizing the need network discovery, visibility, and situational awareness tools to reach their network security goals. It’s becoming an accepted guideline to ask “what don’t I know about my network?” Implicit in that assumption, is the belief that the majority of large global networks have some unknown devices, unmanaged connectivity, or misconfigured access controls which aren’t managed/secured by the already robust systems that many of these organizations already have in place.

At Lumeta, we see the threats born from lack of network visibility on all kinds of networks every day. We believe that you cannot secure what you don’t know about and we’ll continue to advocate that the first step toward real network security and complete network management is for the network to be fully mapped and actively understood.