The challenge
Midlands’s systems had undergone significant recent change and development. With continuing growth in their business both locally and internationally, they wanted confidence now, and into the future, that their IT systems were both secure and capable of continuing to run the business in the advent of a disaster.
Our solution
As we were familiar with the Midlands IT environment, we utilised our knowledge to provide a proposal covering how we would complete both a security audit and an assessment of their fail-over capability.
We collaborated with the business team, interviewing them, and utilising our IT security audit checklist of 240 security related questions, to help identify, discuss, then capture and grade IT security risks.
A range of IT security penetration tests were performed on local networks, wireless, firewall, and on services within the DMZ. We ran both social engineering tests and password cracking tools to evaluate and identify if further staff training was required on IT security risks and social engineering awareness. We also conducted a review around security policies and provided a list of security permissions on file shares.
The summary of our report identified both the strengths and weaknesses of the current security systems, highlighting the potential areas of system failure and the likely impact. It included high-level recommendations, in the form of brief descriptions of the suggested solutions, and the steps to implement a system that had the desired redundancy or fail-over capability. We also provided recommendations on an offsite disaster recovery solution that leveraged their existing backup systems.
Our completed report provided detailed security recommendations, a completed security risk assessment along with grading for focus, and recommendations for both fail-over and disaster recovery. Midlands have utilised our report to help guide IT operations and plan ongoing security strategies and measures, engaging with us for ongoing security assessments to help ensure they have appropriate security and to support their culture of continuous improvement.
"iTops has been a trusted partner, providing IT support services, to Midlands for several years, working well with our internal IT team and always providing excellent advice, support, and service. The work competed by iTops during this recent project has certainly helped Midlands implement improvements and establish a clearer roadmap for the next period of IT infrastructure development and staff awareness training. Thank you iTops, great job"
John Benn
Chief Financial Officer at Midlands Group
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