What Is Enterprise Security? | Fortinet (2024)

Enterprise security involves the various technologies, tactics, and processes used to protect digital assets against unauthorized use, abuse, or infiltration by threat actors. Enterprise security includes the protection of data as it flows across networks, including those connecting satellite offices and those that tie data into the general internet.

Enterprise security systems also cover the people and policies that organizations use to secure their network infrastructure, including assets such as devices and various endpoints. Because enterprise security needs to focus on maintaining the security posture of a company within the confines of the law, it also takes into consideration the legal structures that apply to an organization’s data.

Enterprise security is important because the scope of the threat to enterprises is both immense now and will continue to grow in the future. Currently, nearly every online communication an enterprise engages in is potentially exposed to threats—even interactions as run of the mill as emails.

While it is easy to take email communications for granted, the threat to the information within emails, as well as the login credentials for email accounts, is ever-present. For example, packet sniffers can organize traffic according to what they detect within the packets being transmitted. If they detect potentially valuable information, they can attempt to intercept the communication.

Furthermore, attackers can levy distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on organizations to shut down their websites, rendering them useless to legitimate users. These kinds of attacks may appear random, but they are often backed by months of research and planning. With adequate enterprise security measures in place, you can get ahead of attackers, upending their efforts to penetrate your system.

In addition to technologies that can be used to protect your network, enterprise security also includes education and training that empowers employees to make sound decisions in support of more secure connections. Workers—internal and remote—can be taught how to recognize threats, respond to them, and report them to IT admins or cybersecurity engineers. Further, as workers learn how to handle potential events, the walls between IT teams and others are brought down. This serves to dissolve isolating silos and unite the organization around a common goal of cyber safety.