Designing an effective network to protect sensitive peronal and business data, is crucial to minimise the exposed footprint of the organisation. The core objective of your plan is to maximize your business’ network performance, reliability, future modifiability, maintainability, scalability and most importantly, security.

These are the 5 most crucial areas to look at :-

1. High Value Systems and Assets
2. Network Security Segmentation
3. Monitoring and Prevention
4. Security Event Logging
5. Principal of Least Privilege (POLP)

You will need to categorize and rank your high value assets, and using confidentiality, integrity and availability is a good practice. But understaning their criticality is also important. This will help to highlight the systems that require the minimum isolation, which is normally the internet facing systems, and is common practice to have these in a demilitarized zone (DMZ). This protects your internal systems from a malicous actor who gains access through a vulnerability, but will be unable to laterally move to the high valued systems.