The computing devices used to run today’s organizations are changing and growing at a dramatic rate while IT resources and staffing budgets often remain unchanged. Any organization responsible for managing a BRADFORD NETWORKS NETWORK SENTRY environment should ensure the solution continues to evolve to meet changing business requirements. With proper maintenance and fine-tuning the full value of the solution will be sustained.
BradfordNetworks Network Sentry Service assesses and tunes the following:
Overview
Server & Agent Configuration
As organizations evolve, configuration parameters should be tuned to ensure maximum performance and minimal performance overhead on the network, devices, and endpoints.
Communications
To ensure maximum value, a comprehensive network, device, and user perspective must be maintained. This perspective requires communication with network infrastructure, endpoint clients and Bradford’s device library to ensure the catalog continually stays up to date.
Device and User Profiling
The key to flexible and secure network access is understanding the risk profile of the devices connecting to the network. Knowing the devices, types and users of the devices provides granularity that enables flexible policies while minimizing risk.
Auditing and Reporting
Collecting historical network access data is a critical step to providing the audit trail and perspective that is often needed to rewind a security incident. Automating the report generation and distribution is a powerful way to stay on top of the users and devices connecting to your wired and wireless network.
Alerting
Alerts, a critical real-time monitoring capability, detect and notify security anomalies and violations that require investigation.
Network Provisioning
The risk profile of a device trying to onboard a network can determine the level of access provisioned. With attention to tuning, granular policies can be used to provision full, guest, or restricted access.
Remediation
When users attempt to onboard a network, the risk profile of the endpoint can be assessed to determine the appropriate level of access. Leveraging guided instructions, users can self-remediate their endpoint should it be considered non-compliant.
Integrations
Given the platform nature of the solution, the value can be enhanced by consuming additional feeds and delivering events to other network and security solutions.
Challenges
- Continually ensuring proper configuration and deployment
- Introducing personal devices to enterprise networks – Bring Your Own Device
- Ensure accurate policies and provision flexible network access without introducing risk
- Staff turnover or redeployment leaves knowledge gaps
- New network equipment and upgrades require integration
- New device types require onboarding
- Solution upgrades introduce new functionality that may not get leveraged
Benefits
- Faster onboarding of new devices and users
- Ensure best practices are followed
- Sustainable value from the solution
- Improve security posture and reduce risk
- Safely introduce new devices to your organization
- Ensure maximum console performance
- Ensure maximum endpoint performance
- Seamless integration with existing NOC/SOC solutions
Deliverables
- Key functionality checklist
- Key functionality assessment
- Tuning of Server and Agent parameters
- Reliable communications across all network components
- Impactful network access reports and alerts
- Event integration with core security and operations platforms
- Skills instructions for designated staff to gain experience in best practices
- Duration: 2 days of remote assessment and tuning
