Managing Network Security in IT Sector using the Suricata

In the current era of digitalization, network security is a top priority for organizations, especially in the IT industry, where cyber-attacks are ever-changing. Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS) are a key component in protecting networks from malicious behavior. Suricata, a sophisticated open-source IDPS, has become an effective solution because of its high-performance feature, deep packet inspection, and real-time traffic analysis. This essay discusses Suricata's role in maintaining network security in the IT industry, highlighting its efficiency in the detection, prevention, and mitigation of cyber threats. The article starts by mentioning the basic challenges for IT businesses in protecting their networks, including zero-day exploits, advanced persistent threats (APTs), and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Conventional security solutions usually are not effective in managing a large amount of network traffic at once, causing the detection of threats to be delayed and respond to them late. Suricata overcomes such challenges through multi-threading, deep packet inspection, and protocol parsing for anomaly detection with high accuracy. One of the most important features of this research is the deployment of Suricata in an enterprise network environment. The research offers a detailed explanation of Suricata's rule-based detection engine, signature- based threat detection, and integration with security information and event management (SIEM) systems. It also discusses the effectiveness of Suricata compared to other IDPS solutions, including Snort and Zeek, and its strengths in scalability and performance.