Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Do you know how long your business could be out of action for, before it becomes too much to recover from? Often companies assume there would be no long term impact if they were down for a day, but what about a week or month? What if your site was suddenly out of action for an unknown amount of time?
Our consultants can help you plan for this. We would assess what risk your company faces and assess what factors could result in an outage – elements such as flooding, service interruption or sickness/pandemic situations. We would then help you decide how long you can afford to be out for and finally work out a way to make sure you are up and running again within that time frame. This could include:
This could include, the design and implementation of offsite data collectors for the data you would be reliant on; a site available for you to decamp to if required, or the setting up remote working so your team could work from home if the site was not available
Knowing about the possible impact a situation can have on your business; and the likelihood of it happening can help you determine the best way to protect your company. Don’t allow loss of earning to add to the high cost of a disaster by not preparing for it.
Adaptive Multi-Layer Network Survivability (MLNS)
Do you know what elements of your business are critical for your company to trade? How do you then protect these components, not only from attack, but also from service issues?
Many companies will understand what elements are essential to keep them trading, but often protect these at different layers in isolation to each other. For instance, the application itself will be protected by writing secure code, and the system it sits on will be protected by keeping it up to date and patched. But what about the network it sits on, the service provider that you use and how the users access the application?
Anything from human error to an organised attack can kill a component. The concept of MLNS is to develop the understanding of the component end to end to find ways to protect it in a cost effective fixes - thus allowing the component to survive. Scan Professional Services consultants would look at your most critical assets and see how they can not only protect them from the everyday reliability failures, but also improve the continuous service they are required to provide for your company to trade.
This requires us to help you map the interdependencies of the component, the network design it is part of, the underlying service you use to run it and its own design and architecture to then highlight how to keep it alive. This is in relation to both attacks and service interruptions.
This service must be done thoroughly to understand what is critical to you, and then the steps taken to make sure each layer is understood and dealt with if it is to work correctly. Only seeing one aspect of the whole system, such as the application, would mean you may miss that the network it resides on is not managed correctly. Also, seeing protection as a layer by layer situation could mean you are spending too much in separate places where there is more cost effective way to do the same protection.
For example, if a service is required to be up for you to trade do you have a hot standby to switch to on a separate network and provided by a different supplier? This is so that if the supplier of the power or network goes down you do not. Also, if the original system was infected or attacked you could switch over and investigate the first without impacting the investigation or your business.
Content Control Systems
As a company you may find you want to control what your employees can access while at work. This could because you want to enforce security policies, protect them from the more tasteless parts of the internet or simply control time wasting. Proxy servers can be placed on your internet egress points and customised to prevent your employees accessing certain websites. This can include:
This could include accessing certain websites, such as known bad sites that host phishing attacks, adult content and non-essential sites such as social networking.
As an employer you may also want to monitor the internet activity on your network. This can be done by storing the proxy server’s activity in a monitoring solution - we are also able to advise you on the legalities around such monitoring. This type of content control system is not only of use to commercial business, but can be used in Schools and Local Authorities to control what the pupils and teachers access.
Scan Professional Services is able to help your organisation build the policies to make sure your employees follow your controls.
System Monitoring
Your systems must be available for use at all time, so how do you know when something goes wrong in your network? Is it when you get the call to say something doesn't work?
Scan Professional Services can help you implement a solution that will either send SMS (text) or email alerts when a system goes down. Not only can you set it to do this when a failure occurs but also if it reaches a specific quota, when a service, such as logging, turns off or when a user has reached their quota of failed logon attempts.
All these functions allow you to develop the system to flag suspicious activity as well as the original requirement of system availability, and as our solutions are based on an Open Source application it is compatible with most of the mainstream servers and appliances you will have in your network.
Security Tool Design and Deployment
Having a security tool deployed can act as peace of mind for your company, but failure to recognise the right places to deploy these tools may mean they are useless to you should a real situation occur.
Do you know which tools you use and that you have them deployed correctly to protect your network and data? Are you sure you are sending it the right data and using it correctly? If so, do you understand how they interconnect and what happens with the output?
There is a huge choice of security tools on the market that can help you protect your network and data but knowing which to use for your specific situation can be a minefield. The Scan Professional Services team can help you decide on what you need, where you need it and how when combined as a toolset it will protect you. We can assist your system administrators pick which tools you need and advise on which would work best together based on the technologies and your budget. Bringing the network protection toolset into a single manageable setup can help you effectively protect your network in an efficient way.
Contact Us
Scan 3XS offers a wide range of professional services, fully customisable to your requirements. Please contact us for further information and pricing.
