Take your security to the MAX with real-time monitoring

10:06 Canberra, Aus @BsidesCbr – Anyone that has been to this side of the world can’t help thinking about time – right now I am in the future compared with the folks in North America and UK. As a result, I’ve had to do more than my fair share of customer calls really early in the morning or late at night while on the LOGICNow Security world tour. From all accounts it’s been a great tour, meeting with partners and prospects to talk security and how important it is to their business and customers. So this blog post is going be about time. Specifically, how having more time provides customer security wins. We’ve made a quantum leap forward with our MAX Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) platform. Real-time architecture is from the future, and faster MAX is better MAX. Better for security and better for your customers and users.

Real-time architecture

For the MSP or IT pro shop, moving faster and more efficiently enables growth and supports key business projects. Our real-time architecture, having five-minute agent check-in times for servers and workstations is a huge advantage. This allows a business that has made the investment in MAX RMM to get on top of issues – security or otherwise – faster. Moving at MAX speed has a huge security advantage and here is why: Patching workstations. With the old 30 or 60-minute check-in time, despite automation the cycle could take a while to complete. Here is how MAX speed can get this process going faster, with faster check-in times and automation combined.

1. Initiate an update of the workstation agent, if required, wait 10 minutes (2 x 5 min check-in cycles)
2. Initiate your workstation Data Breach Risk Scan using MAX Risk Intelligence (RI), wait 10 minutes (2 x 5 min check-in cycles)
3. Schedule your workstation reboots to occur after you are comfortable the MAX RI scan has completed. Workstations should not have a lot of data on them; servers are where the data should be located so this process should be about 10 min long (2 x 5min check-in cycles)
4. Schedule your patches to roll 15 minutes after the reboot time you decided on in step 3
5. Make sure your machines are set to reboot after the patches roll out

Of course, the best time to do this activity is long after your users have left for the day – by leveraging the patch management policies most of this process can be automated or scheduled. Protecting your end points faster means stopping the exploits for unpatched software. Execute this process weekly for your customers or organization, and stay in front of the latest threats. Patch management, sometimes called vulnerability management, is LOGICNow’s top best practice when it comes to Security.

Faster check-in times

Servers are a different case for faster check-in times. In general, they should not be surfing the internet, if they are you may have a problem which patching can not fix. You may have bad guys already inside your network! Faster check-in times for servers give you the heads-up faster, enabling you to get on top of problems faster. Usually a business can handle a workstation going down; they might even have a spare, but loosing a server, having it go offline or a stopping critical service is usually a very big deal. When your server is configured to perform infrastructure checks, or security event log checks, knowing something has gone sideways allows you to be more responsive as an MSP. For demanding clients it’s important to know when a server is not showing up to work and the business might be down. LOGICNow is committed to building the best-in-class security solutions and real-time architecture is an important part of that vision. The real bonus is this, if you are using a full stack of the products, chances are real-time architecture will not cost you a thing as it will be included in your price cap. As always, if you have billing related questions, please contact your account representative.

Ian Thornton-Trump, CSA+, CD, CEH, CNDA is CTO at Octopi Managed Services Inc. Ian is an ITIL certified Information Technology (IT) consultant with more than 20 years of experience in IT security and information technology. He enjoys and maintains a strong commitment to the security community. From 1989 to 1992, Ian served with the Canadian Forces (CF), Military Intelligence Branch; in 2002, he joined the CF Military Police Reserves and retired as a Public Affairs Officer in 2013.

You can follow Ian on Twitter® at @phat_hobbit.