Managed Services

The provision and management of departmental and Internet firewalls has become an expensive and complex undertaking for company IT departments. Secure Networks have been in the business of providing, supporting and managing firewalls and security devices for over three years.

Secure Networks offers companies the opportunity to outsource the monitoring and management of their firewalls to a dedicated team of highly trained security experts through our managed service.
Secure Networks managed service includes everything necessary to enable full firewall protection at the entry and exit points in your network.

Firewalls can be linked together to provide sophisticated VPN (Virtual Private Network) infrastructures. Each implementation of this service includes:

• System administration
• System management
• Security policy management
• Software upgrades
• Monitoring and alarm management

Introduction
With years of experience in managing security solutions, Secure Networks has identified the key challenges to delivering highly scaleable and secure services, which continually meet and surpass customers expectations.  Secure Networks has its own highly qualified and trained security experts who monitor, manage and react to security events.
Secure Networks managed service includes:

• Log file analysis: We use sophisticated parsing techniques to analyze the firewall logs, looking for security events and problems.  Due to the large volumes of log data created by security devices, effective and timely capture of security events can only be achieved by performing this analysis of the source data.
• Alarm creation: Once we encounter a security event, or notices a problem on the firewall, an alarm is generated and communicated back to the engineers. Once our engineers have determined that a response is warranted, they will follow a pre-defined escalation process.
• Remote management: We provide a highly secure and encrypted tunnel for management of the firewall. This approach enables the Secure Networks Ltd security engineers to remotely configure the firewall, and perform software upgrades and troubleshooting.

System administration and management
Secure Networks can deliver the management and administration of the firewall without on-site assistance from the customer. A key element of the service is the quality assurance and reliability we build in as standard. By using a rigorous process to test software patches and major releases, we can ensure your firewall is running the most stable and secure version available.

We ensure system integrity before rollingout the whole system in the production environment. Our aim is to keep the system up-to-date and implement the latest fixes and patches as they become available.
However, this is only done once we are sure that nothing else will be affected. This is done in two ways:

• For a patch or fix, we ensure the original problem is fixed and the patch does not introduce unexpected side effects or new problems.
• For a major release, we ensure that it is compatible with other system elements, is stable, and that it introduces important new enhancements.

Experienced Team
All security engineers are trained to the required accredited standards, however the majority have substantially more skills in many areas of security management. This level of expertise is crucial to maintain the level of service dictated in the SLA (service level agreement).

Change requests
Designated contacts within an organization are used for authorizing all policy changes. This can be initiated from the email. Alternatively a fax plus authorized signature can be used.

Change control
All changes are managed through a change control procedure, and all changes are “vetted” to ensure the overall security of the firewall is not compromised by an inappropriate request. Additionally, all changes are logged and recorded, with the option to quickly roll back the security policy if necessary. For extra peace of mind, a secure copy of all configuration changes is kept by Secure Networks; this enables us to role back systems to previous working versions with the least amount of interruption to your network.  You are entitled to 10 change requests during the period of this service.
A change request is defined as a change to the network, firewall or VPN configuration.

Security policy management
Secure Networks security engineers will manage and maintain the firewall rule base to ensure a robust security policy is maintained and will make changes to the policy based on appropriate requests from customers.

Management reports
Monthly management reports are included within the managed service. The log files are automatically stored on a secure server at Secure Networks and are used to create on-line graphical reports. These reports provide information about suspicious activity, including firewall rule violation, attempts to gain unauthorized access, and possible denial of service attacks. Other reports display detailed information about traffic volumes by service and firewall utilization. These reports are created weekly and can be accessed from a secure area of the Secure Networks website.

Service Level Agreement
A support representative will log your problem and issue a call reference number.  If applicable a solution will be given, if this is not the case the call will then be escalated to an engineer for further investigation and advice.
Secure Networks will respond to all technical support and change requests within 4 hours of a call being logged with one of our security engineers. If required the issues will be escalated both internally and were necessary direct to the vendor.

VSS
VSS (Vulnerability Scanning Service) is an optional extra, which provides remote vulnerability testing across the Internet.  The Secure Networks VSS emulates the typical activities of a hacker by testing for the presence of over 1000 vulnerabilities.

Supported platforms
Secure Networks are currently able to support a very broad range of platforms please contact our Sales team to discuss your requirements.