In today’s digital age, businesses must be proactive in protecting their sensitive data and networks from cyber threats. One way to do this is through the use of breach and attack simulation (BAS) tools. BAS tools are designed to test the resilience of a company’s cybersecurity policies and procedures by simulating real-world cyber-attacks. This allows businesses to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses in their systems before a malicious actor can exploit them. However, many business leaders may be unsure of the differences between breach and attack simulation, vulnerability scanning, and penetration testing.

Vulnerability scanning is the process of identifying and assessing vulnerabilities in a company’s systems and networks. This is typically done using automated tools that scan for known vulnerabilities and provide a report on any that are found. Penetration testing, on the other hand, goes one step further by actively attempting to exploit vulnerabilities in a company’s systems and networks. This is done by a team of ethical hackers who simulate real-world attacks to identify and assess the effectiveness of a company’s cybersecurity defences.

BAS takes a different approach by simulating real-world cyber-attacks in a controlled environment. This allows businesses to test their cybersecurity policies and procedures in a realistic scenario and identify any gaps or weaknesses. One of the challenges when deploying BAS is knowing how to deploy it within different customers’ unique technical architectures, to test all the critical security policies. Kedron provides this expertise as part of their service along with ongoing support and review. This means customers get the benefit of a delivered managed service but without the higher costs of a total outsource arrangement.

Kedron offers the ThreatSim product from Keysight, a market leading BAS solution, as part of their service. Many experts in the field, such as Gartner and Forrester, have stated that Breach and Attack Simulation is essential for enterprise security teams. Gartner states that “BAS solutions are essential for enterprise security teams to test the effectiveness of their security controls and identify vulnerabilities that need to be prioritized for remediation.” Forrester notes that “BAS has emerged to provide an attackers view, with deeper insights into vulnerabilities, attack paths, and weak/failed controls, making it an essential tool for any enterprise security team looking to proactively identify and remediate vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by attackers.”

In conclusion, breach and attack simulation is an important tool that should be used in addition to vulnerability scanning and penetration testing. It allows businesses to test their cybersecurity policies and procedures in a realistic scenario and identify vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.

Read our recent Survey Report in partnership with Keysight Technologies, to learn more about how KedronUK and ThreatSim can help you business with BAS services.

Call us today on 01782 752 369
KedronUK, Kern House, Stone Business Park, Stone, Staffordshire ST15 0TL

Who are Allegro Packets and when was the company established?

Allegro Packets was formed by Klaus Denger, a serial tech entrepreneur, in 2007. Based out of Leipzig Germany his mission was to provide affordable, fast and easy to use insights into Network issues. This led to a range of 4th generation Network Performance management solutions.

How did Allegro Packets and Kedron come together?

Kedron was identified as a Partner who could add to Allegro’s channel only focus, as previous experience of working together of management made a good fit. Kedron’s customer first ethos fitted perfectly with Allegros, who’s continued development of the solution is based on customer feedback. 90% of all development is done this way with regular user feedback days.

What gap is Kedron filling for Allegro Packets?

Kedron as a partner brings real benefit as a true Value-added reseller. Years of experience in the Network performance management field has lead to a wealth of expertise that could see the benefit of the Allegro range. From small portable solutions to large Enterprise installations Kedron has the staff and project management skills to ensure a successful deployment.

What can Allegro Packets bring to Kedron?

When the initial solution was created. The first pillar was performance. 3rd Generation systems captured all the packets, then extracted for analysis. This had two problems. The first is time to extract those packets, mining through all the captured packets, takes time. The second is capturing and storing all those packets require huge drive arrays. 4th generation Allegros overcome this by real time analysis that allows users to instant go to the issues. Packets of interest can then be stored. This leads to the second pillar affordability. Less storage = lower cost. Allegro’s bring performance management back to sensible budgets levels with superb ROI. The third pillar, ease of use, is from a simple intuitive L2-7 menu system with a top down view means issues can be found quickly and easily. Add the software is the same on a large data centre as it is for portables an easy hybrid monitoring and ad-hoc environment can be created, without learning two sets of software.

Phil Swainson, Head of Technology at KedronUK says: “We’ve found that customers managing enterprise networks are struggling to find a network performance management tool focused on packets that can handle the demands of high-speed, high-bandwidth networks, while not breaking the bank with excessive storage requirements. The unique way Allegro Packets solutions work means that network managers and IT Ops managers can get the information they need without having to search petabytes of data.”

To find out more about Allegro Packets, please Contact us or get in contact with our sales team through sales@kedronuk.com. 

Call us today on 01782 752 369
KedronUK, Kern House, Stone Business Park, Stone, Staffordshire ST15 0TL

I’m often ridiculed for how frequently I use the expression ‘garbage in garbage out’, in fact many of my colleagues know when I’m about to say it and mouth it back to me, so let’s get it out of the way now; When it comes to commissioning, or onboarding, an NMS I believe the administrators mantra should be GARBAGE IN GARBAGE OUT!

An NMS comes into its own when alerting an incident, providing the location of a root cause or allowing you to obtain data for a report, and if the commissioning and maintenance of the system has been sloppy, then you will get what you deserve.

With the best will in the world, however, unless data input is managed and controlled to defined best practises, users will often resort to ‘minimal input’ to achieve their goal. This is often exacerbated by new and or inexperienced users being tasked with the process of commissioning or on-boarding, which often occurs a little while after initially installing a new NMS, when the experienced engineers move onto the next project.

During the initial commissioning phase of a new NMS, time and emphasis is placed on the quality of the input, only later for this repetitive task being given to less experienced users with ‘Local Work Instructions’ (LWI’s). LWI’s provide a guideline of best practise, but provide little if no governance of best practises, add to this human error, and a company quickly moves to the ‘garbage in garbage out’ situation, there, I said it again.

Usually at the outset of deploying a new NMS platform, great emphasis is placed on the presentation and structure of the solution:

• Will device grouping be geographical, service, business unit, device type or the like?
• Will augmented data be required from additional sources, such as address or Geo data, service contracts and SLA details?
• What device tags will be required for filtering and reporting?
• Which user groups will have which roles and visibility?
• What views will be created and who will have visibility?

Defining these, however, is only the first step; enforcing them, moving forward, is entirely another.

Why, though, is this so important? Carefully crafted reports, for example, with filters that include inventory items based on specific attributes, will only continue to include all the required inventory, if the specific attributes used in your filters are completed correctly by your users. It is very common to see systems that looked so complete and fit for purpose, when initially commissioned, to be far from being fit for purpose just six months later.

Additionally, understanding what’s missing from an NMS, continues to present a major challenge to administrators; how do we know what we don’t know?

For well over a decade, KedronUK have worked in conjunction with some of the UK’s leading network management companies with best of breed network analysis and management tools and platforms, in the process we have defined best practises in utilising these tools and platforms. In recent years, our Customers have increasingly called for automated processes and procedures to enforce these defined practises.

Therefore, we have developed our ‘Commissioner Portal’ to define and enforce configured inputs, reducing human error and ‘free form’ inputs to a minimum. Empowering inexperienced users to on-board devices exactly as administration define and presenting network management tools with a clean set of data.

The Commissioner Portal allows for the definition of associated data sets to be created in advance which are simply selected by the end user rather than having to be input at the point of inventory insertion each time. This could be a data set related to a physical site location for example. The data set for a Site can be as extensive as required but does not require re-entry every time an inventory item is added to that site.

With a set of predefined reports, the user is able to see at a glance the current status of his onboarding attempts and ‘see’ what is missing from the NMS, when compared to the commissioning database.

We have recently made the decision to combine the Commissioner Portal with the KedronUK TOTUUS solution. The Commissioner Portal now becomes a module of the already extensive TOTUUS solution, with its Data Connectors (DCX) providing automation of Inventory updates from 3rd party systems and flat file locations, along with automated data normalisation, allowing for seamless commissioning of an NMS solution from 3rd Party systems or element managers.

If any of the above strikes a cord with you please get in touch with us here.

Call us today on 01782 752 369
KedronUK, Kern House, Stone Business Park, Stone, Staffordshire ST15 0TL

The global COVID-19 pandemic has, in more organisations than will ever admit it, exposed business continuity plans as tick-box formalities with little to no value in a real crisis.

In our tech-enabled world, we’ve begun to take it for granted that the IT systems and devices we rely on ‘will just work’. That’s turned out not to be the case, with many organisations facing issues with licensing, availability and connectivity, for example. Even those contingencies that were in place didn’t account for the speed and scale of change that we’ve had to deal with in the last few months.

Some enterprises have found gaps in their ability to track productivity and engagement among employees working from home. That’s not to mention issues with monitoring network availability, application performance and security at a time when new technologies are being adopted and infrastructures rapidly adapted.

While most organisations will have got to the functioning stage by now, there are inevitably compromises being made due to the nature of working from home. On the surface, operations may seem to be running smoothly, but how is your business being impacted? Will your business’ reputation suffer because you simply can’t see the issues you’re having with, for example, employee productivity or app availability?

To make a proper plan and make sure that plan is working, you have to ensure business continuity is measurable. This will more than likely include metrics that are not typically visualised by your IT monitoring dashboards, but which are central to monitoring business performance, such as productivity and engagement, absentee rates and supply chain deliverables.

Our team has developed Business Continuity Dashboards which link data from multiple sources to provide an overview of your key business metrics, so that you have remote visibility of performance against your SLAs in every aspect of operations. Root cause analysis can be conducted, and problems addressed to ensure good customer experiences are maintained. When a crisis hits you can carry on as close to usual as possible, but you’ll also be able to tell at a glance what ‘usual’ is.

Let’s face it, things aren’t going to go back to normal. A successful and sustainable transition out of lockdown will mean learning the lessons available in your data to make more informed business decisions. But you need visibility to be able to see and analyse what that data is telling you. Whether the gaps that have been exposed are on security, on operations or on networks, now is the time to get better visibility and improve your monitoring capability permanently.

We believe that those organisations which take the time to reflect on what they’ve learned will be proactive in using monitoring technology to future-proof their enterprise. They will put themselves in a position to emerge stronger from this devastating pandemic.

Contact us to discuss the place of critical data monitoring and visualisation in your business continuity strategy.

Call us today on 01782 752 369
KedronUK, Kern House, Stone Business Park, Stone, Staffordshire ST15 0TL

For organisations of all stripes and sizes, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenge. Whether you’ve benefited from a huge increase in online sales or been swamped with customer service calls, whether you have a desk-based team all happily working from home or delivery drivers out on the road at all hours, your IT infrastructure will have played a critical role in keeping your business up and running – and so will your IT team. 

Maintaining good end-user experiences throughout this period was – and still is, in most cases – key to the longer term sustainability of your enterprise. Where IT performance, availability and security issues aren’t dealt with quickly and efficiently, it can cause huge reputational damage or loss of business. 

If you don’t have visibility of remote workers when it comes to productivity, engagement, access, network security and a host of other areas, how do you know things are functioning as they should be? There may be problems you’re not aware of, and if you are aware you may be struggling to find the root cause.

Such problems are compounded by the fact that your IT team are working remotely themselves, with a proportion off on sick leave at any given time. And at the same time, this department is being relied on to support other staff with their IT needs and likely firefighting demand and downtime issues. 

For 15 years now, we’ve been vendor-independent consultants specialising in application and network performance monitoring, so we know which software will give you the visibility you need to track your business metrics. Our solution architects are able to identify new ways to use tools you already have to tackle new problems, as well as recommending tools that will integrate with your existing infrastructure. 

There are numerous examples of software that can be deployed quickly and remotely to provide better visibility of your key data. To give just two, you can use:

• Ixia’s Hawkeye to run tests from end user laptops or mobile devices, quickly understanding how their home environment is impacting access to key business services. 
• Instana to gain 1 second granularity into application performance and issues, supporting key containerised applications. This SaaS platform provides immediate visibility of key web applications such as e-commerce. 

We offer support to deploy these solutions quickly and easily, with remote configuration and installation or even technical staff on-site where necessary. By exploring what the most helpful solutions might be for your circumstances, you can use data to your advantage to make better business decisions now and improve your monitoring capability permanently.

You can find out more about some of the solutions we provide in our guide to getting visibility fast. To talk about your specific monitoring needs, call us on 01782 752 369.

Call us today on 01782 752 369
KedronUK, Kern House, Stone Business Park, Stone, Staffordshire ST15 0TL