What to Monitor?

Monitoring of equipment, especially security equipment, is essential to the operation of any company. When buying equipment, however, it is frequently a function that is overlooked. Many companies rely on the IT manager to carry out this role in his day to day work. The problem is that most IT staff are already busy and routine monitoring is not something they can fit into their day. So this vital task is ignored until a sudden unexpected systems failure occurs. Effective monitoring is not a trivial task. As a bare minimum, the following would be wise:

1. Check to ensure the system is alive and responding
2. Check if the system has the latest patches and updates
3. What are the current attacks being launched on the system?
4. Are these attacks critical?
5. Are all the security services on the system running correctly?
6. Is the hardware running within normal operating tolerances?
7. What is the load on the system?
8. Is there anyway of seeing any trends that will predict issues in the future?

The next issue to consider is who does the checking. Ideally they need to be experienced in network security so that they can identify the threats and take the appropriate action. However, even if a company attracts skilled IT staff, it needs to have a sufficient number of such personnel to offer protection from security risks throughout the year to cover eventualities such as staff sickness, holidays and turnover. This is not only difficult to achieve but also expensive.

An alternative is to look at a Managed Service that provides built-in monitoring as part of its services.

Network Box Monitoring

The Network Box monitoring service is hosted in our SOC's (Security Operations Centres) and continuously polls the client's Network Box. It collates the information and runs in excess of 100 checks against the status of the Hardware and Software. Amongst this miriad of tests, the monitoring :

• Ensures the system is alive and responding
• Alerts if updates cannot be PUSHed to the appliance
• Continuously feeds back the attacks being encountered by the appliance to the security team
• Checks for the correct operation of the services on the appliance
• Runs tests to ensure the hardware is healthy, from fans to hard disk

The Network Box monitoring service reports all of these tests and many more back to the SOC's where experts can see trends and provide solutions depending on the nature of the traffic.

In addition, Network Box can provide a wide range of different service levels, which allows clients to choose the best monitoring solution for their company's needs.