6 Most Powerful Enterprise Level Software for Security Management

But world-class security management is about more than simply purchasing security software. You also need to:

1. Train employees to reduce the chances of them compromising data or falling for a phishing scam.

2. Establish an access control system to limit the number of people who can view or handle sensitive information.

3. Reduce or eliminate physical documents to minimize the risk of physically losing or damaging your data.

To better explain what enterprise level software for security management is, and how to protect yourself from ransomware attacks, we’ve put together this comprehensive guide.  

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• 4 Reasons you need strong enterprise security

• How to build tough enterprise security architecture

• 6 Best off-the-shelf enterprise security software

• How to build custom enterprise security software without the in-house talent

• Custom vs off-the-shelf enterprise security solution: Which one is right for you?

• Frequently asked questions about enterprise-level software for security management

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4 Reasons you need strong enterprise security

Information lives in different places: computer hard drives, paper documents, the cloud, and people's minds. That’s a lot of places that could become compromised. 

In fact, ransomware attacks grew by 13% in 2022, a huge jump that equals the rise in the past five years combined. You can’t ignore data security and have to take dedicated action to prevent breaches. Strong enterprise security can:

1. Prevent cybersecurity attacks

2. Avoid losing money

3. Save your reputation 

4. Meet data governance regulations

1. Prevent cybersecurity attacks

Ransomware, malware, phishing, and hacking are among the most common security threats. Falling for any of these can cause you to:

• Lose access to your data and spend millions of dollars to get it back

• Have your computer infected with malware and damage your data

• Give access to strangers to internal systems and information

Software for security management can help you shield your servers and reduce the possibility of being the target of one of these attacks.

2. Avoid losing money

Ransomware attacks usually involve hackers gaining control over your data, changing the access information, or encrypting it. They use your data as a hostage to get cash payments.

Companies spend $812,360 on average to pay back ransomware attackers and, in almost all cases, experience a negative impact on their ability to operate. So, you’re paying attackers and losing money while operations are paused. That can sum up to 1.4 million dollars in ransomware remediation.

3. Save your reputation 

It’s hard enough to get people to know about your brand, let alone trust you. Building a good reputation can take years and a ransomware attack can damage it in seconds. Protecting your servers isn’t only about avoiding data leaks, it’s about guarding your prestige.

When a cryptoware attack is successful, it often gets into the news and users start to worry about their data being compromised. That may cause them to change providers. 

4. Meet data governance regulations

Depending on where your company operates, you’ll need to follow different data governance regulations. e.g. California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) if your company is based in California. 

Purchasing software as a service (SaaS) for security management or developing a custom solution can help you comply with different regulations. For instance, you can use or build a tool to encrypt your customers’ data.

How to build tough enterprise security architecture

Buying commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) or subscribing to SaaS enterprise-level security software is usually a simple and effective solution to most companies. However, these tools might not be enough to protect your company against powerful ransomware attacks or specific security requirements. 

If you develop your own solution, you’ll need to pay for tools, servers, and developers, but you’ll end up with a security system that’s totally bespoke to your business. To go custom, your team will need to:

1. Assess security needs 

Before implementing security measures or developing the architecture, your software team will assess your architectural needs and run a risk assessment. Make sure you set goal metrics for each requirement to gauge success later. This includes meeting compliance regulations (i.e. GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI) and any custom security policies. 

2. Involve development, security, and operations (DevSecOps)

DevSecOps is a software development practice that means embedding security in an automated and scalable way. It’s also about including security requirements early in the development process. As part of the DevOps practice, it also adds security to the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. 

Your team will set up additional tasks to your CI/CD pipeline and get it to run static code analysis tools like Sonarqube or Code Climate. These tools will alert them in case of vulnerabilities, Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), or other security best practices aren’t applied properly. 

3. Choose your tools and frameworks

Your programmers will write a list of tools that they’ll use to develop a secure architecture. They’ll also find different security architecture frameworks to benchmark against what others are doing and follow best practices.

There are several tasks involved in protecting your organization and data, such as protecting your servers and databases, and performing security audits. These tasks are time-consuming. That’s why it’s always advisable that your software team uses a highly tested and adopted standard security management framework. 

They can follow the ISO-27001 NIST Cybersecurity Framework and OWASP guidelines or take advantage of one of the existing Well-Architected frameworks:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) Well-Architected Framework

• Azure Well-Architected Framework

• Google Cloud Architecture Framework

4. Hand-pick your security team

Your internal security team is responsible for teaching best practices and maintaining enterprise security. As security breaches can happen in different spaces, there should be one person per type. That is, the same person who trains employees on phishing shouldn’t necessarily be the one who translates security policies into code. You should pick this team along with your programmers.

5. Come up with a security plan

This is the roadmap on how to meet the outlined requirements. Your team will 

• identify, 

• assess, 

• audit, 

• manage, 

• and supervise each part of the infrastructure. 

Then, you and your developers must train the organization and vendors on how to protect the company in case of potential threads.

6. Set up your servers

Define if you're hosting your data in the cloud or on-premise. If you’re hosting online, ask your developers to choose a cloud service provider that:

• Complies with industry standards and regulations

• Is compatible with your technologies 

• Has a plan to continue improving and adjusting to trends

• Follows data security, governance, and policies

• Has a contract and service-level agreements (SLA) that you fully understand 

• Has great proven performance 

• Has a remediation plan and is reliable

Invite them to use infrastructure as code (IaC) tools like Terraform or Cloud Formation to enforce security recommendations in the cloud service provider. 

7. Establish access control and protect sensitive information

82% of security breaches are caused by human errors, but assigning granular user permissions can help protect even multi-tenant applications. Ask your software team to limit access to data and assign viewer and editor roles depending on the information each one needs to perform their roles. 

Enforce the use of password vaults like LastPass or 1Password to share passwords, usernames, or access codes in a secure manner. Invite your developers to use a secret manager to share API keys and certificates. At NaNLABS, we use the AWS Secret Manager in all environments to store and rotate secrets in a protected manner. 

Lastly, implement a communication system to share sensitive data. For example, get your employees to disclose confidentiality in the email subject line. That way recipients won’t open it in a public place or with other stakeholders around. 

6 Best off-the-shelf enterprise security software

There are thousands of security management software solutions that you can purchase today. We’ve compiled a list of the ones we trust and recommend. 

Note that most off-the-shelf enterprise security software are composed of some of these modules:

• Firewalls

• Authentication systems

• Intrusion detection

• Prevention systems

• Antivirus and malware protection

• Data encryption

Many of these components can be used as a plug-and-play solution, but others might require integration with your codebase. Complete your research by asking your internal software engineering team how much intervention these tools actually need. 

1. Bitdefender GravityZone Business Security Premium: Best malware and ransomware protection

GravityZone is strong enterprise-level security software. It combines great anti-ransomware and endpoint protection and secures entry points and user devices (like personal laptops). 

Main features and benefits

• Ransomware prevention and mitigation: This tool has a full understanding of the cyber kill chain. So, it comes up with a defense for each possible attack. This functionality alerts and removes potential cyber threats automatically and in a timely way. 

• Network attack defense: GravityZone detects potential network vulnerability and blocks attacks.

Why the users like it

2. Microsoft Defender: Best cloud security software

Microsoft Defender for Cloud (formerly Azure Security Center) is a cloud-based security platform that provides unified security management across hybrid cloud workloads. It also offers comprehensive protection against malware, ransomware, and other cyber attacks.

Main features and benefits

• Secure cloud and hybrid workloads. This tool protects your business against threats across multi-cloud and hybrid operations. Plus, you get access to a dashboard to review and understand the different security vulnerabilities. 

• Strengthen the security of your cloud resources. You can get continuous security assessments of your Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud resources. Create custom requirements or use built-in policies that align with industry and regulatory standards. 

Why the users like it

3. VeraCrypt: Best data encryption tool

This open-source free platform can encrypt different drive sizes that host your data and restrain hackers from accessing the content. Since it’s open-source, you can adjust your preferences as needed. This tool protects your operating system even when you’re offline. 

Main features and benefits

• Password codes for file sharing. VeraCrypt automatically adds a security password to all your data and partitions to reduce information security risks. 

• VeraCrypt virtual disk. This tool allows you to create a virtual disk to encrypt your data. All files are always encrypted when you save them to the disk and decrypted with a password when you read them.

Why the users like it

4. Kisi: Best for setting physical access control

Kisi is a cloud-based SaaS platform that allows you to manage office access. With Kisi, you can set individual permissions to spaces, events, and visitors. This platform lets you physically protect secured data—and any information your employees might say out loud!

Main features and benefits

• Grant visitor access. Give temporary access to third parties that might be accessing your offices in person. Kisi creates a temporary keycard that visitors can open from their mobile devices. The access gets revoked after the period of time you define. 

• Granular level access permissions. Set individual access to different doors, rooms, and locations. Kisi uses geolocation to look for or unlock doors for specific users. 

Why the users like it

5. Netskope Security Cloud: Best cloud threat protection

Owned by Dell, Netskope is similar to GravityZone but is used for accessing online websites. It gives you real-time data on incident response and protection when using cloud services, online sites, or apps. You can also grant granular access to users and encrypt tokens with other Netskope products.

Main features and benefits

• Spot and block malicious sites. This feature uses 40 threat intelligence feeds to spot and block dangerous websites that your people might be accessing.

• Identification of anomalies. Netskope identifies and fixes suspicious user behavior like phishing, data exfiltration, insider threats, compromised data, and abuse of privileged account access.

Why the users like it

6. Palo Alto Networks: Best firewall software

Palo Alto Networks is a cybersecurity company that offers different products. One of its core products uses zero trust principles to keep businesses secure from cyber attacks. Its next-generation firewalls use deep learning to block attacks.

Main features and benefits

• Zero-delay signatures remediation. Palo Alto Networks ensures that threats or suspicious behavior only happen once. It blocks them and gets rid of the potential threat as soon as a user sees it. 

• Spot and identify the internet of things (IoT) and any connected devices. This tool uses machine learning to identify every IoT device and validate the profile. This avoids having unmanaged devices connected to your network.

Why the users like it

Palo Alto Networks is highly recommended by users with a 4.6/5 score on Gartner. Users choose this platform over others because it’s fast and effective firewall software. 

How to build custom enterprise security software without the in-house talent

Of course, in some cases, buying existing security management software won’t cut it. You might have particularly stringent data protection requirements or unique business needs that won’t get met by something “out of the box”. 

But that doesn’t mean you’ll have the time or talent in-house to  build a custom enterprise software solution. If that’s the case, you can partner with a software agency like NaNLABS to augment your development team. 

We’ll integrate with your team, communicate using the channels you prefer, and keep you involved throughout the development lifecycle. You’ll get an Agile workflow and a high-quality solution that’s completely tailored to your business. Don’t need the whole package? No problem, we can offer consultancy services too!

Ready to build your own custom software with a team that cares about you and your processes? We’re not code monkeys, we care about you. 

Get in touch. We don't byte

Custom vs off-the-shelf enterprise security solution: which one is right for you?

Failing to meet compliance requirements puts your company at risk. So, you need to decide what security management system is best placed to protect your business and your stakeholders.

If you need a solution fast and there’s one on the market that can solve your needs, you should look for a SaaS or COTS solution. These are highly effective and will likely solve most of your security issues. 

However, if you have the budget and can hold the fort with a commercial solution until you completely incorporate security into your software infrastructure, develop a custom solution. It’s not always necessary to build something from scratch, but there are some businesses that can’t take security lightly. If that’s yours, consider augmenting your team with expert developers who can guide you through the development lifecycle and make sure your system is robust.

Ready to build your own custom software with a team that cares about you and your processes? We’re not code monkeys, we care about you. 

Get in touch. We don't byte