Time to read: 2 minutes 11 seconds | Published: October 1, 2025
Network Security What is network security management?
Network security management allows an administrator to manage a network consisting of physical and virtual firewalls from one central location. Administrators need network security management solutions to get a high level of visibility into network behavior, automate device configuration, enforce global policies, view firewall traffic, generate reports, and provide a single management interface for physical and virtual systems.
Problems network security management addresses
In today’s complex network architecture and constantly changing threat environment, it is challenging for IT staff to maintain an effective security posture. Security administrative tasks include supporting an ever-expanding matrix of users, devices, locations, and applications; adhering to compliance; enabling new services; optimizing performance; ensuring access controls and security mechanisms; and troubleshooting on demand. Any misconfiguration can make the network vulnerable to sophisticated threats and regulatory noncompliance.
To confront these challenges, network administrators need to deploy security policies across their network consistently and without error. However, the network infrastructure might have hundreds of firewalls and thousands of firewall policies that have accumulated over the years. Often these rules are cluttered, duplicated, outdated, or conflict with new rules, inadvertently affecting a network’s performance and security.
The following illustration depicts a scenario from a typical enterprise, where the IT department needs to address network security management.
Network security management helps reduce manual tasks and human errors by simplifying administration with security policy and workflow tools through a centralized management interface.
Network security management can reduce risk across the network and protect data by leveraging information on threats, network vulnerabilities and their criticality, evaluating potential options to block an attack, and providing intelligence for decision support.
Policy administration is improved by unifying common policy tasks within a single interface, automating policy change workflow, including compliance audits and the management of multiple firewall vendors. This simplified and automated security policy management enables IT teams to save time, avoid manual errors, and reduce risk.
How does network security management work?
Network security management provides complete visibility into the network and generates data for assets (asset groupings and classifications), firewalls, applications, ports, protocols, VPNs, NAT, security policies, and vendor devices. This information drills into the details for individual devices and is analyzed. The data is translated into intelligence that decrypts security transactions into manageable, actionable information in the form of policy creation. Updated policies are distributed to enforcement points (firewalls), ensuring network protection.
HPE Juniper Networking implementation
Security Director (both Security Director Cloud & Security Director) is a comprehensive network security management solution that combines intuitive and advanced security visibility with automated policy management. The Security Director has an easy-to-use intuitive interface, granular configuration options, and predefined profiles for rapidly deploying devices and security services. Security Director helps administrators manage all phases of the security policy life cycle for stateful firewall, unified threat management (UTM), intrusion prevention, application firewall (AppFW), VPN, and Network Address Translation (NAT) through a centralized web-based interface across the sites. Security Director enables efficient policy management for multiple security devices and provides highly scalable device management.