We all face it - the daily barrage of spam, now infested with zero-day malware attacks, not to mention the risks of malicious insiders, infected laptops coming and going behind our deep packet-inspecting firewalls and intrusion-prevention systems. Some even have to worry about how to prove steps of due care and due diligence towards a growing roster of regulatory compliance pressures.

What can you do under so much extreme pressure to make 2007 a better year, not a year loaded with downtime, system cleanup and compliance headaches? I've come up with what I would consider some of the best network security practices.

Best practices are things you do - steps you take - actions and plans. Within those plans, I'm certain you will include which security countermeasures to budget for in 2007. Although I thought about going into details about recent security concepts, such as unified threat management or network admission control, it seems more appropriate to focus on the seven best practices instead of the seven best security tools you might consider deploying. For example, I consider encryption a best practice and not a product or tool. I'm sure you'll find many commercial and freely available tools out there. You can always evaluate those tools which you find most suited for your own best-practice model.

Here's my best practice list, in order of importance:

1) Roll out corporate security policies
2) Deliver corporate security awareness and training
3) Run frequent information security self-assessments
4) Perform regulatory compliance self-assessments
5) Deploy corporate-wide encryption
6) Value, protect, track and manage all corporate assets
7) Test business continuity and disaster recovery planning

Although I could have made this list a little bit longer, these seven make the cut because if you implement them, you should see a rapid improvement in network uptime, performance and your IT regulatory compliance posture. Let's take a closer look.