Why consider information security monitoring?

The threat is growing

In June 2005, the NISCC (National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre) warned that UK government and companies were being targeted by a series of e-mail and web-born trojans.  Normally focusing on individuals who have jobs with commercially or economically sensitive data, the principal goal of these attacks is to covertly gather and transmit otherwise privileged information.  Once installed on user machines, the trojans may be used to obtain passwords, scan networks, exfiltrate further information and launch further attacks.

Pressure from stakeholders

Major organisations are now under increasing pressure from customers and clients, especially the banks, who require to know what their security controls are, whilst providing remote access to systems for key officers and customers.

Need for full-time security

Some organisations may only have a small IT department, with responsibility for everything from desktop support to maintaining the phone systems. It is not an option for them to manage security on a full-time basis.

Trend to outsourcing

More and more companies are now outsourcing information security monitoring, particularly firewall systems, remote access devices, network intrusion detection, e-mail services, application servers and the hosting of web services.

Less expensive than in-house function

Maintaining a dedicated information security monitoring function in-house is expensive and requires deploying IT security staff on work that is considered low-level and mundane.

Frees up staff

Because the process of managing security has now become a full-time job in many organisations, outsourcing the monitoring of information security provides the opportunity for IT departments to free up their staff to work on new developments.

Growth of managed services

In the UK, 5% of all e-mail scanning is now provided as a managed service. This is predicted to rise to over 50% within 3 years.

PRISM

Proactive Real-time Information Security Monitoring

Hytec's PRISM range of services begin with supplementing a customer’s existing information security team (for example providing a monitoring, reporting and incident handling service out-of-hours and weekends), to providing a fully managed 24x7 service whereby Hytec accepts full responsibility for management of the information security system, including change control, proactive system management, system monitoring, incident handling and reporting.

The benefits of outsourcing information security monitoring through PRISM are that it saves you money, it makes your organisation more secure and it frees up staff from mundane security monitoring processes.