Ukuvuma Solutions, a leading ICT consultancy and systems development specialist, has developed a comprehensive security and intelligent threat management system to help businesses strengthen the protection of their assets against an unwavering onslaught of attacks.
The offering empowers any-sized business with access to world-class security intelligence, analytical and forensic capabilities.
For the most part access to this level of security analysis and management has been exclusive to large enterprises. These sizeable operations usually have a measurable information security budget to facilitate and utilise a security operations centre and staff.
Small-to-medium sized businesses have not had the benefit of this technology – until now.
Ukuvuma Security Solutions has launched a cloud-based security system based on a model that can plug into any existing information security infrastructure and/or monitoring service. It also places best-of-class information security analytics and forensic services at the disposal of these companies.
Andrew Chester, Security Officer at Ukuvuma Security Solutions, the security services and solution development division within the Ukuvuma Group of companies, says the offering meets a growing need for greater insight from corporations into the realities of attacks that threaten businesses today.
“Corporations are largely under information security attacks without the ICT and security staff realising the breadth and depth of the attacks. Our experience shows that most corporations do not have insight into critical security and anomalous events within an ICT network and environment,” says Chester.
He explains why the cloud component is significant. “This cloud service allows corporations, of any size, to determine which events are occurring within their environment – whether it’s a local or cloud environment. The events can then be classified according to severity, as well as have automatic, active response policies set in place to block attacks sooner, rather than later.”
In practice, the solution enables businesses to act decisively on security events and isolate them. Working with Ukuvuma’s Cloud Security team, staff are able to proactively manage threats. This means that threats can be contained, analysed and eventually blocked, with the additional benefit of determining what led to the attack in order to mitigate risk going forward.
How it works
The service collects information on all client end-points, such as workstations and laptops (with mobile devices being included soon), as well as network & backbone equipment. Additionally, the system collects information from the entire network in an active & passive manner.
It then intelligently analysis all of the captured traffic for anomalous activity, in other words – it looks for activity which shouldn’t occur within the environment, such as when a hacker is busy trying to compromise a server or when they are trying to steal information. It does this by monitoring several critical key points within traffic and system information which allows it to result in far less false positives.
‘Bad’ activities are identified, flagged and the system then alerts Ukuvuma Security Solutions as well as the client. It can also automatically block certain activities from occurring in the first place.
“We can then assist the client in identifying what is going on, and how to handle it from then onward… this way we are able to identify attacks in realtime, as well as security vulnerabilities when any environment and close the vulnerabilities before the client is compromised and damaged,” Chester adds.
“The offering is easily integrated and overhead for the client minimal,” Chester continues.
“The client has access to a fully manned, always-available security operation and analysis centre which is hosted off-site. As such, there is minimal expenditure compared with having to invest in building a security operations centre. One also has to consider that specialised forensic and analytical skills sets are not readily available in the market and by outsourcing the role to a cloud-based solution like this equates to true differentiation,” Chester continues.
Ease of use and the fact that the model is priced on a per-end structure basis (which alleviates the enrolling and removal of endpoints is easy) have been identified as true benefits to the user.