MANAGED SERVICES cloud
PCI-certified, the standard also applies to physical facilities, such as the datacentre. This includes access control, surveillance, procedures for visitors and a limit to who has access to the equipment that handles and stores transaction-related data. If your business is going to be engaged in online sales, then PCI compliance is a good idea.
It is also vital to ask questions about where your data is stored. Who owns the servers, racks and even the datacentre? How secure is the datacentre itself? What certifications does the datacentre hold for data and physical security? Some providers tend to be vague about these questions, especially if they are co-located or worse, located in a jurisdiction with different privacy laws to those of the customer.
Before getting into the specifics of the technical infrastructure, just like any other supplier, it is wise to understand the business as a whole, its pedigree and the people you are dealing with. Even creating
a shortlist can be a daunting task. One starting point is industry groups. The Cloud Industry Forum has created a Code of Practice for Cloud Service Providers that includes organisations that offer customers remotely-hosted IT services of any type. These services include, but are not limited to, multi-tenanted services accessed via the Internet.
Firewalls – a good place to start
Companies looking to outsource their IT security can dip a toe in the water by having their firewalls managed. Every single organisation that has access to the Internet needs some form of firewall protection, and somebody to set up, monitor and manage this critical gateway. In the event of a security incident, organisations will need to analyse firewall logs to quickly identify the cause of the issue. They should then interpret the results and undertake remediation to minimise the possible damage and prevent further risk. This
often takes a whole team of experienced individuals to accomplish.
Managing firewalls is time-consuming ‘bread and butter’ work for information security professionals, which can often make the task a good test case for switching to managed security services.
Managed firewall services provide the equivalent of a dedicated in-house manager or department and typically offer the features of larger, best-of-breed vendor products. The service provider delivers a centralised management function and VPN capabilities to allow manageable site-to-site and remote access. A typical service can scale from a single branch office to a global deployment that adheres to consistent corporate security policy.
A managed service will include hosting the firewall hardware in a carrier class environment or placing it on the client site and managing it remotely. In either case,
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