The key to unlocking cloud security opportunity for telcos

The demand for cloud security services in today’s dynamic cyber security landscape, is growing at a rapid pace across the globe.

But unlocking the huge new revenue opportunity in the enterprise market segment for a telco or data centre operator is a challenging task.

Having worked for many years in Telstra Corporation – the #1 Telco in Australia – developing end-to-end managed network, security and Internet products and services for enterprise and multinational customers across the world, and advising  service providers as an independent specialist consultant on ‘tapping’ the rich vein of opportunity arising from the rapidly-evolving, cloud-driven software-defined networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) ‘mega-trend’, I recognise the imperative to couple telco-ready security gateway orchestration on cloud infrastructure with best -practice  integrated service & security management and business process frameworks to enable Telcos and CSPs to cost-effectively and rapidly create, launch and deliver these cloud security  solutions to enterprise customers.

Currently, telco and data centre operators have to expend significant time and resource to engage multiple security vendors, source & integrate the latest best-of-breed technologies with legacy and ‘new-wave’ OSS/BSS IT systems and processes, deploy across a variety of telco, private or public cloud infrastructures, and, on top of all that, design, create and deliver the right service offerings for their enterprise customers.

But there is a way to unlock this potential and accelerate realisation of this opportunity by deploying the right platform that quickly transforms legacy telco solutions to the exciting cloud future.

At the heart of this platform-as-a-solution, is a sophisticated, purpose-built multi-vendor management and orchestration engine (‘MANO’)  powering  a scalable telco-grade platform that unlocks innovative, differentiated cloud security gateway solutions, and easily delivers them as ‘Your Telco’ branded cloud security services for telco business, enterprise and government customers, thus reducing the time to revenue, capex and opex investment and operational risk to deliver and support new services to customers.

First and foremost, this cloud orchestration suite is ready today for any telco and data centre operator, who wants to sell and deliver a variety of new revenue-generating security and related cloud- based solutions as a service to their enterprise customers. It incorporates already- accredited, pre-integrated product and technology solutions from a variety of world-leading security vendors, abstracted into enterprise-ready service templates  to drastically simplify offer creation and launch, and also automates the provisioning of these services for delivery in multiple cloud environments, whilst providing management and reporting for both telco and customer through a single pane of glass.

In summary, telcos need a scalable, vendor-neutral, telco-grade, cloud-delivered and fully-integrated platform-based solution that accelerates service design and deployment, delivers the required security controls and capabilities and supports governance and compliance for their customers. With the increased sophistication and breadth of best-in-class security solutions now required to protect an enterprise, telco-ready cloud orchestration puts management and control of cloud security back in the hands of telcos so they can provide a holistic approach to the complex cloud security needs of their customers.

If you would like to learn more, please contact us at info@firstwave.com.au

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How To Quickly Determine User Rights For A Device

Who has Administrator level access on your computers?

Would you know if someone was added to the Local Administrators (or root / sudo) group on a computer?

You can use Open-AudIT to quickly determine if the required users have administrator access to your devices and conversely, easily determine users who have local administrator access when they should not.

Open-AudIT has a built-in query to easily show you the user access on each of your devices.

Information is presented in an easily readable table format that is exportable to CSV (Excel), HTML, XML and JSON formats.

To enable the query go to menu -> Admin -> Queries -> Activate Query. You will see a list of available queries. Click the ‘tick’ icon on the right side to activate the “Local Administrators” query and make it appear in your menu’s.

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Simple device discovery using Open-AudIT

Open-AudIT will discover any device on your network.

Using the correct credentials will allow Open-AudIT to retrieve a great deal of information about any given device via SNMP, SSH or WMI.

Windows, Linux, OSX, AIX and VMware have specific audit scripts that can be run against the target device and will do so automatically as part of discovery.

Other network devices that respond to SNMP can have their most important attributes retrieved.

When running a Discovery session you can automatically assign any detected devices to a location and/or organization.

Check out the video below to see how quickly you can see exactly what is connected to your network – if it’s connected, Open-AudIT will find it!

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Auditing Web Servers with Open-AudIT

Do you know how many websites are running in your organisation?

You might be surprised to see the number, not only of actual web servers – but also the number of sites those web servers are serving.

Open-AudIT has a built-in query to easily show you the websites (even those not running) in your organisation.

Information is presented in an easily readable table format that is exportable to CSV (Excel), HTML, XML and JSON formats.

For each website you will see – the name, OS and environment of the computer running it, the web server name and the sites name, description, status, instance log status, log format, log rotation policy and directory.

To enable the query go to menu -> Admin -> Queries -> Activate Query. You will see a list of available queries. Click the ‘tick’ icon on the right side to activate the “Web Sites” query and make it appear in your menu’s.

NOTE – Open-AudIT currently retrieves the most information from IIS based servers, but Apache servers on Linux are also catered for. Watch this space!

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AntiVirus Program Auditing with Open-AudIT

Your AntiVirus console should tell you which PCs have their AntiVirus software installed. But will it tell you which PCs don’t have their AntiVirus software installed? What about your server’s that live in a DMZ or another disconnected network? What about AntiVirus software from another vendor?

Because Open-AudIT captures the programs installed on a PC, Open-AudIT can report on specific installed programs very easily.

Open-AudIT contains a query for installed antivirus software which will tell you not only which PCs have which AntiVirus software installed, but also those without AntiVirus software installed.

Information is presented in an easily readable table format that is exportable to CSV (Excel), HTML, XML and JSON formats.

This is a very simple query and can easily be extended by the user to add additional software names when checking (if your antivirus software name doesn’t match the default names provided).

To enable the query go to menu -> Admin -> Queries -> Activate Query. You will see a list of available queries. Click the ‘tick’ icon on the right side to activate the “Installed AntiVirus” query and make it appear in your menu’s.

Now go back to the homepage and click on the name of a group.

Once you see that group of devices, click menu -> Queries -> Installed – AntiVirus.

Done. How easy was that!

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Business Services – Redefining Multi-Tenancy

Over the last decade or so, I have worked with many organisations and while all of them are different, they have many things in common. One thing organisations have in common is the need for more flexibility in the authentication system to give them the ability to provide access to resources being managed by the people who need to see them, this needs to include the ability to view individual resources, like interfaces and chart data, which are defined at a lower level than the operating system (e.g. a node). It needs to be possible to permit users of the network management system access to more specific data from almost arbitrary objects.

Over the last few months, Opmantek has been working on an alternate authorization system which will permit our customers to be able to define views of what is being managed so that they can permit their customers to see information that they might not ordinarily be able to see without giving them access to view an entire node.

A simple example of the benefits of this capability would be for service providers who have shared equipment, where multiple customers are using one or more interfaces from one or more switches. This might be a metropolitan area network, with switches in the basements of buildings and each customer uses one or more interfaces.

With our new multi-tenancy authorization, roles are created for each customer and the associated user names, then several business service views are created by selecting the interfaces of one or more switches and adding them to a business services view for the customer. When the customer logs in, they have access to see the business services view and all of the associated interfaces. They are then able to drill into the interface to see the statistics.

Another good example of this might be an IT Services company which provides general IT services to businesses, along with network and server management. Amongst the equipment being managed are some telephones and the related network interfaces. A partner of the IT services company assists with the management of the phone systems and requires the ability to see switch ports which the phones connect to. With traditional authorization schemes the telephony engineers would require logins giving them permission to see the entire switch including interfaces for things not related to their duties.

With the new multi-tenancy authorization, a business services view can be created and the required telephony interfaces added to that view. When the telephony engineer logs into the system, they will only see the interface information they need to keep an eye on the telephony system.

As an option, the ability to display summary node information in business services views is also available, allowing key operational summary information to be shared without providing access to the full device. When clicking on an interface name, it is possible to see the detailed graph of the interface.

While providing this is already very powerful, we felt that providing more detailed access would also be beneficial, so we have extended this capability to the charts and maps in opCharts. This means that you can create a chart including, for example, the CPU load of several devices, and then permit the customer to view that chart. The same applies to maps.
Going forward Opmantek will expand this capability significantly to include more granularity in the authorization and more resources available to be permitted. We will also work to simplify administration of the system wherever possible.

We are very excited by being able to take authorization to a new level of flexibility and simplicity, enabling our customers to in turn be more flexible with their customers and manage third party vendor access more diligently.

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