Out Of Your Control

LogiKeep’s managed services products touch only parts of a company’s overall security system, but other vendors are taking the concept to the extreme. Today’s dearth of trained security personnel has led some vendors, such as Guardent and Santa Clara, Calif.-based MyCIO.com (now called McAfee ASaP after recently being reabsorbed by its parent company, Network Associates), to offer truly outsourced managed security services--from monitoring to virus protection to firewalls.

DPR Construction, a Redwood City, Calif.-based construction company with 1,500 employees in 18 locations throughout the country, has successfully deployed MyCIO VirusScan to more than 1,500 workstations.

Before turning to VirusScan, DPR was always behind the curve regarding virus protection, Network Manager Lee Rocklage says. When the "I Love You" virus hit last year, for example, only 300 of the company’s 1,200 workstations were up to date with the latest virus definitions. Now all workstations are protected; anytime employees access the network or the company’s intranet, they receive the most recent protection for their machines.

In addition to giving Rocklage peace of mind, outsourcing the security headache to someone else allows him to focus on other things. "It’s an unbelievable relief to get some of this off of our plates because we don’t want to spend our days fighting viruses when we’ve got so much else to do," he says. Rocklage notes that with this workload easing in mind, DPR has now adopted other MyCIO services as well.

Intruder Alert!

All-in-one security services aren’t the only newcomers to the security scene. Intrusion-detection software--which seeks to identify when unauthorized users access a network by pinpointing and reporting suspicious activity, such as repeated attempts to enter incorrect passwords and denial-of-service attacks--has also become a hot topic.

Everett Carter, director of security at BankServ, a provider of Internet payment services based in San Francisco, uses a combination of the ICEpac Security Suite from San Mateo, Calif.-based Network ICE and Network Flight Recorder from NFR Security in Rockville, Md., to protect the company’s $2 billion in daily transactions.

The products are intended to protect against a comprehensive list of security breaches, and they send an alarm when any are detected. They also allow security analysts to audit network traffic so that they can reconstruct it at the time the breach occurs, helping identify exactly what events happened during the attack and providing clues about ways to prevent similar events.

Like Carter, protecting large sums of money is something Chris Smith knows a lot about. As vice president of computer information systems at EasCorp (Eastern Corporate Federal Credit Union) of Woburn, Mass., Smith is charged with ensuring that the organization, with 100 employees and more than 250 credit union customers, is fully secure.