THE NETWORK is the lifeblood of your organization. Without it, you cannot access or share information with your peers or clients. Thus, networks are strategic assets to the organization. Network security is needed for organizations that access, transmit, and store sensitive data. Your network and data may be under a regulatory compliance law. What do we mean by regulatory compliance? Regulatory compliance laws define and mandate what organizations must do and how they must do it in terms of security and privacy of the sensitive data. Compliance laws and mandates will be presented in this chapter.

Security will be defined by the three tenets of information systems security: availability, integrity, and confidentiality. Each of these topic areas will be described in relation to network security in this chapter.

Finally, this chapter will cover common network risks, threats, and vulnerabilities and how to mitigate them with a layered security architecture and security controls.