Managed Perimeter

Topic

Impact of In-house versus Outsourced

Review of Firewall and Perimeter Device Logs

Timely review of firewall and perimeter device logs is critical to identifying growing threats and incident review. Companies that perform these functions in house typically find a significant investment is required to build, configure and maintain a new set of tools. In addition, there is a significant learning curve associated with the processes and management necessary to deliver results.

RKON aggregates these tasks and tools across multiple customers enabling a systematic and consistent approach. Economies of scale allow RKON to apply multiple resources, systems and management oversight to tasks that are often overlooked by companies who do it themselves.

Industry Trend Identification

It is impossible for customers to see their problems, security threats and challenges in a bigger context the industry when all they can look at is their own environment.

RKON monitors 1000’s of devices and has tools aggregating those events into a central system allowing us to more quickly distinguish between and an isolated incident and an industry wide problem such as the early stages of a virus breakout like a “slammer”.

Compliance Fulfillment

Outsourcing perimeter management helps fulfill compliance for several reasons. 1) Outsourcing creates a “separation of duties” that is always viewed as favorable by auditors 2) Experienced Managed Service companies like RKON provide auditor “friendly” compliance information and reporting for a large set of customers already in the format they are looking for.

RKON has the experience, report templates and approach to consistently satisfy compliance audits. Compliance requires companies to not only review those incidents but to prove they have a process in place to do such. Most organizations continue to fail compliance audits based on the lack of discipline associated with what is typically a part time job for most network engineers. Organizations new to compliance often have a large learning curve and investment to put the people, process and technology in place to fulfill these requirements.

Patching and Maintaining

Consistent patch management and version maintenance is one of the key components to creating a highly available and stable environment. RKON’s experience has been that most organizations are significantly behind in proper maintenance and patching including critical security patching. This often results in unnecessary downtime and in many cases can force a version upgrade in the middle of an outage in order to remedy a problem.

RKON provides proactive and timely patching significantly reducing security risks while improving uptime and reliability.

True 24 x 7 Support

Most organizations do not have sophisticated systems and the redundancy in people to truly guarantee timely 24 X 7 response and coverage to incidents. In addition, many network engineers suffer a “quality of life” challenge by being on call 24 x 7 x 365. Vacations and days off then become major risk factors for companies with small staffs.

RKON has the economies of scale associated with aggregating demand from hundreds of customers enabling proper investment in people and systems to create the proper rotations and coverage that solves this challenge.

Change Control

Most organizations do not have an external expert reviewing and evaluating changes before implementation. Based on our experience, a significant portion of downtime and security risks in our customer base are created by clients making ill advised changes or under estimating the impact of those changes.

RKON aggregates problems and the results of upgrades from 100’s of clients and thereby providing the knowledge base to draw from in predicting the outcome before the change is made.