Tune in to hear from Malcolm Orekoya, our CTO and host of the series and guest JP Kehoe from SKOUT Cyber Security as they introduce NetUtils Talks Security (NUTS) in our very first episode. Created with small to medium sized organisations in mind we’re here to help you make sense of the ever-changing cyber security landscape with real life information and actionable advice on how you can get protected.
Discover more about:
The growing skills gap, the pace of change when it comes to cloud adoption and not to mention COVID
The increase in tempo and the complexity of cyber attacks with cyber security becoming more of a priority
The need for partnerships and collaboration within organisations to harness unique skill sets
Cyber security pioneer launches UK’s most comprehensive managed service offering 16 core features with 24/7 SoC to help larger enterprises strengthen their end-to-end cyber security posture
Kent, United Kingdom – February 2021, NetUtils, a leading IT specialist has launched the UK’s most advanced and highly integrated managed cyber security service aimed at helping larger enterprises to improve cyber security defences while reducing operational cost and complexity.
The new “Platinum Tier” includes a fully staffed, 24/7 Security Operations Centre (SOC) and is backed by NetUtils continued certification around the ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 standards and as a registered Crown Commercial Service supplier.
The new top tier service offers every element a large enterprise should deploy based on best practice methodology and includes Advanced Endpoint Protection, Vulnerability & Patch Management,
Managed Firewalls, Email Security Gateway, Privileged Access Management and Cloud Access Security Broker capabilities. The built-in SOC services provides full-time security monitoring across devices and applications including Office 365 along with structured Security Awareness Training sessions and ongoing helpdesk service. The Platinum tier is available at under £45 per user per month with significant discounts for larger organisations.
“Larger enterprises are faced with the dual challenges of managing more remote staff while still trying to deliver the core IT projects that are critical to the business. Our Platinum Tier Managed Cyber Security services are based on feedback from several enterprise customers around what they need – and is effectively a formalisation of a number of disparate services that we have been delivering successfully for many years.,” says Ashok Thomas, CEO for NetUtils. “When you look at the overall cost and especially when you factor in our 24/7 SOC capability, our Platinum service will typically save enterprises with a 1000 staff or more, hundreds of thousands of pounds each year in operational cyber security costs – with the assurance of transparent SLA’s and round the clock expertise.”
The new Platinum tier managed security services also aim to address several challenges that have accelerated due to the ongoing pandemic including critical digitisation projects, reduction in IT budgets and ongoing cyber security skills shortage. According to recent research by PWC, a consultancy, that questions over 3000 senior executives at larger organisations; 96% of executives have shifted their cybersecurity strategy due to COVID-19 while 55% of respondents lack confidence when their cyber spending is allocated towards the most significant risks.
NetUtils has built a reputation for technical excellence and is the most certified Juniper Networks partner in Europe and maintains over 420 industry and vendor accreditations within its team including CISSPs and CISMPs, Fortinet’s NS7, and Juniper JNCIPs. As part of the managed cyber security services launch, NetUtils has invested over £1.2 million adding more staff, enhanced training, and additional data centre capacity to meet growing demand.
As David Bundock, COO for NetUtils explains, “Our top tier managed security service helps to address the operational challenges and skills retention issues that larger organisations are facing at a time when external factors such as COVID and Brexit are impacting core business processes. Our technical expertise and ISO compliant processes can help large enterprises improve cyber security though a trusted partnership that allows them to focus on their core business without compromising on active cyber security controls and monitoring.”
NetUtils are a leading UK specialist integrator of network, security and data solutions for enterprise, telco, MSPs and ISPs. With more than 27-years history and over 400 enterprise and service provider clients including household names across finance, education, public sector, manufacturing, and healthcare, NetUtils brings its customers the depth and breadth of people, technologies and services to improve business performance in this ever-changing digital world.
NetUtils Media Enquiries:
Kara Jenkinson Head of Marketing t: 020 8783 3800 e: kjenkinson@netutils.com
The technology industry is one that never stands still, but the cyber and security space specifically are even more fast paced than most other sectors of the industry. This in many cases can be attributed to the fact that the activities of cyber criminals are squarely focused on breaching enterprise security defences, because this is how they generate their income. Put simply your users and your business is their primary target.
The pressures on IT operations, compliance and security posture are immense. Organisations constantly have to navigate the complexities of industry jargon and trends to keep abreast of the latest offerings and figure out the best fit for their business. This can be a full-time job in itself. But if IT is not your core business, then why should you burden yourself with managing it yourself?
The very nature of a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) is to alleviate the pressure by allowing you as a company to spend your time focusing on your core business, customers and innovation, in the knowledge that the necessary tasks that are required to keep your company safe and operational are in hand with the experts.
The Experts
An MSSP is a specialist, who’s core business is IT. As a result, you’re leveraging the expertise of a bigger team, who are up to date in all areas, that is, not just on general industry knowledge or the threat landscape, but also on the specific solutions and applications deployed within your business. It’s our responsibility to make sure the tools we use and the services we provide are always best of breed.
We spend the time and investment to train our teams, to get certified and fully compliant. We spend the time working closely with our vendor partners to understand the best ways of installing and using their products. We spend the time evaluating new and innovative solutions to the market.
We put in all the hard work, so you don’t have to.
Proactive Operational Efficiency
Managing the daily IT related tasks of most organisations can take most of the working day. Focusing on continuous improvements to revenue generating business critical tasks as well as customer service improvements, is what in many businesses determines their bottom line. It should not be surprising to learn therefore that most IT related operational improvements and security tasks can often be relegated to the back of the line. As long as things are working, then in many cases businesses are content and happy to focus their attentions elsewhere. Until of course something goes wrong.
By outsourcing the important IT operational management tasks to a trusted MSSP, you are ensuring that your IT environment remains operational at all times, because it is the responsibility of your provider to take care of security advisory notices, security patching, configuration management, access management, performance management, availability management, audit management and many other mundane but absolutely essential tasks to maintain a highly available and secure infrastructure. It’s our responsibility to be proactive on your behalf rather than reactive.
Speed of Implementation
It is no secret that there is a growing trend for many companies to outsource certain services, be that networking, telecommunications, cloud or security services. Besides the obvious cost savings and controls it affords, it certainly also helps free up internal resources and time. But there is one other major reason why MSSP services are being consumed at quite a staggering rate and that is speed.
Speed of implementation, widely known as how fast one can act on an idea, strategically or tactically, is often times what can set you apart from your competition. With the massive growth of cloud adoption and the improvements in its capabilities, we see a huge increase in the abilities of an MSSP to provision and deliver services to customers that would have previously taken weeks or months in only days and even hours in some cases. The reason for this is often that the provider has already provisioned its service capabilities ahead of time, so the service is simply ready to onboard new customers as and when they are ready. This of course takes a lot of planning and forethought on the part of the MSSP in order to be able to offer these ready to go services, so it can be said that the customers speed of implementing a new or replacement service is directly related to that provider taking earlier action.
Discover NetUtils’ Managed Cyber Security Services to Suit Your Business Needs
Save time, money and resource with our cost-effective cyber security services; keep your users safe, protect your infrastructure, enhance your security and mitigate your risk against cyber crime.
By utilising our expertise and experience you’re leveraging an enhanced team who are constantly trained and certified in all specialist areas. We work alongside industry leading vendor partners and invest the time and resource, so you don’t have to.
Get a first-hand view on the State of Privileged Account Management (PAM), the benefits of Cyber Essentials and why reducing organisational risk in this ever-changing threat landscape is crucial to your business.
Many industry analysts have started to pay attention to Privileged Account Management over the past few years.
Privileged
accounts are difficult to secure and one of the reasons for this is because
they are unknown, if they are unknown then they are definitely unmanaged, which
then means they are unprotected.
What
runs parallel to the security benefits of being able to discover and manage
privileged accounts is auditing and compliance control that comes with that. If
those accounts are unmanaged then they are unprotected, so you have no auditing
information and no access control around who did what and when with any of your
privileged accounts.
Forrester’s
reveals that 80% of breaches involve privileged credentials*.
What
we are talking about here is the human and non-human privileged accounts that
exist across your network and connected devices. It is critical yet often
difficult for enterprise IT security teams to manage these without the correct
tools in place.
SANS
reveals that 85% of cyberattacks enter through compromised endpoints.
It’s
difficult to comply with regulations and reduce risk, a least privileged policy
is needed to remove excessive privileges and without adopting this least
privilege policy virtually all windows and mac computers remain vulnerable
despite having the tools in place, things like AV and web protection are of
course important pieces of endpoint application, however if privileged accounts
exist on the device it will always be an attractive attack vector.
Gartner
ranks privileged account management as the CISOs #1 security priority.
This
really does drive home the importance of how critical it is to secure
privileged accounts and have the correct tooling in place. On that list of Gartner’s
Top 6 Security Projects Thycotic address 4 of these within the 6:
#1 – Privilege Account Management
#3 – Anti-phishing
#4 – Application Control
#6 – Detection & Response
What
this means is through a single toolset you can address 4 of the top major
security projects ranked by Gartner CISOs report in 2018 & 2019.
Cyber
Essentials & Cyber Essentials Plus
Cyber Essentials is essentially designed to help organisations of all sizes meet the basic level of cybersecurity and threat protection within your business.
What’s the difference?
Cyber Essentials Certification involves self-assessment with an online form to get self-certified.
Cyber Essentials Plus Certification involves the same procedure as Cyber Essentials however you will then need a certifying body that will validate all the information to meet the 5 core requirements of the certification.
The DCMS Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2019 reveals that 32% of businesses identified cybersecurity breaches or attacks in the last 12 months. Amongst those, 32% needed new measures to prevent further attacks, 27% took up staff time dealing with breaches or attacks, 19% had staff stopped from carrying out daily work and 48% identified at least 1 attack or breach a month.
This government led scheme outlined by the NCSC helps organisations meet foundational security requirements by addressing 5 technical controls, which will reduce organisational risk if addressed sufficiently.
Privileged Account Management (PAM) can assist with all
of these technical controls. The tools Thycotic offer can drastically improve
all of the processes that fall under the 5 technical controls outlined by the
NCSC.
The
Cyber Essentials scheme was launched on the 5th June 2014.
There has been a lot of traction over the last 18 to 24 months, however since October 2014 it became a mandate for any organisation looking to secure government contracts that involve handing personal information or delivery of certain ICT products and services. Equally so in January 2016 this certification become mandatory for the Ministry of Defence for all suppliers.
It
is not mandatory just yet for many industries. The Cyber Essentials
certification is a step in the right direction when it comes to proving that
your organisation is serious about cybersecurity and getting ahead of your
competitors. Let’s not only think of the outward facing benefits, this
certification also gives you piece of mind that you know you have taken the
fundamental steps towards reducing your organisational risk.
How
Can We Help You?
There are many ways NetUtils can support you to have a good cybersecurity posture. If you would like deeper insight into how Privileged Account Management and Cyber Essentials can reduce your organisational risk, then get in touch today.
Here at Network Utilities we offer a range of services and enhanced support from simple pen testing to 24/7/365 telephone support to fully managing your IT security. The aim is to remove the burden of niggling IT issues or staff shortages allowing you to focus on your critical projects and business objectives.
Watch our snappy 30 minute webinar with our Principle Technology Strategist; Malcolm Orekoya and hear about our:
Security-as-a-Service
Network and Security Health
Training and Support services
Enhanced Support Services
Do you need any more info? Call us on 020 8783 3800 or fill out the form below.
By Malcolm Orekoya, Senior Technical Consultant at Netutils
Views expressed in this post are original thoughts posted by Malcolm Orekoya. These views are his own and in no way do they represent the views of the company.
With user demand increasing at a rapid rate businesses are spending more and more time and money keeping their networks running and highly available. Investment is now consistently made in redundancy everywhere. Two or more of everything in the network is now normal practice; dual routers, dual firewalls, stacked switches, dual ISP’s, multiple application server, dual power inputs etcetera. All this redundancy will no doubt keep the network uptime high, but will it necessarily keep things running smoothly?
Here are 4 tips worth considering:
Optimum Use of Resources
What is the point of having huge bandwidth, the fastest network with great big servers everywhere if you cannot make the best use of them? Allowing ALL types of traffic/users/applications (the good, the bad and the ugly) through your network without any visibility, policing or prioritisation of business critical services and applications, essentially amounts to a waste of all that investment that you’ve put into providing the robust network in the first place. There are good and bad users as well as good and bad applications both inside and outside of your network and they will always seek to utilise or take advantage of any open, free or unpoliced resources they can get hold of. As C-level executives, IT Managers, Network Managers or IT Administrators, it is your responsibility to make sure you can make the best use of your network resources to provide the best user experience, while preventing malicious usage and controlling the usage of unimportant (low priority) application/traffic.
A Proactive Network
Historically network management has always been very reactive in its approach to dealing with network problems and network traffic utilisation. In general, until there’s a problem (usually reported by users) to investigate, everything is considered to be working and traffic is considered to be “normal”. Ever thought of a “learning network”? A network that can monitor the types of traffic coming in and going out, identify applications and users where applicable and even inform you about changes in the types of applications passing through your network when compared to what is normal (i.e. the baseline). A network that can monitor applications and server response times then proactively alert you based on a traffic light system “Red-Amber-Green” highlighting potential issues. A network that can provide you with recommendations on optimum policies to apply to your network based on your traffic and not just wait for you to figure it out (usually only after there is an issue to troubleshoot). It might sound a bit futuristic, but the good news is, it’s not. All of these elements that make up “a proactive network”, already exist in the Exinda Network Orchestrator solutions.
Application Performance Monitoring
Almost everything within a network today comes down to two thing; applications and services. All the infrastructure that underpins everything boils down to providing some sort of application and or service to a user somewhere. Therefore it can be said that keeping the user experience good and ultimately the user happy comes down to making sure the application or service is performing optimally. To do this you first need to have complete visibility of all applications running through your network. Then you need to be able monitor the most critical applications to your business (usually productivity applications) and establish a baseline of what can be considered “normal”. You then need to be able to observe when these applications start not performing optimally and very quickly figure out why that is the case. Scrolling through pages of log data will not speed up this process, so most importantly you need something that can do all of this for you easily and provide that information back to you in simple (ideally) graphical format.
Speedy Troubleshooting
By making sure your network resources are used optimally and your network proactively informs you of the performance and utilisation of your network applications; you will already have decreased the time it takes to troubleshoot network issues. Having done all this however, it is important to have a monitoring tool available to you that can instantly provide real time analysis of traffic passing through your network as well as being able to look instantly at historic utilisation data for comparison. This will inevitably speed up troubleshooting and reduce downtime.
Want to know more? Please get in touch. info@netutils.com
If you’re responsible for managing your company network bandwidth we would like to personally invite you to join our free half day technical workshop on Wednesday 3rd December 2014 at the National Space Centre, Leicester, UK. For more information and to sign up visit: http://www.netutils.com/exindaSpace.php
About Malcolm As Senior Technical Presales Consultant at Netutils Malcolm consults and advises on specialist IT Networking, Security and Service Management requirements.
Cyber Essentials Certification involves self-assessment with an online form to get self-certified.
Cyber Essentials Plus Certification involves the same procedure as Cyber Essentials however you will then need a certifying body that will validate all the information to meet the 5 core requirements of the certification.
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