Security Architecture & Design Solutions

The Purpose

DBAlawy Security Architecture and Design Solutions focus on network architecture to help prevent many attacks from occurring and minimize the impact and contain the threat if an attack occurs.

Architecture and Design That Supports Your Business Goals 
Good network security starts with architecture and design. Your architecture must minimize the risk of attacks. Attacks will occur nonetheless. So your architecture must also help you contain and recover from a successful attack.

To help you meet these ends, we look at your architecture and design to pinpoint how you can improve them. But security isn’t just about vulnerabilities—it’s about the consequences of a security breach on your business. So, more importantly, we look at your architecture and design to make sure they’re serving your business goals.

Architecture is strategic. We help you to develop an architecture that supports not just your immediate goals but your overall business strategy.

Design—or assessment of design—is tactical rather than strategic. We focus on identifying the technology that’s available now to solve the problems at hand. Technology, of course, changes—often rapidly. So we re-examine your design frequently to make sure it’s up to date.

Resilience, Flexibility, and Scalability 
Resilience, flexibility, and scalability are the foundation of good architecture and good design.

Implementing a standard on your current architecture may not be possible. Most security solutions operate in the application layer of your system. But if the lower layers of your system aren’t performing properly, they won’t be able to support the solution. We make sure your architecture accommodates a solution in the best way so that it performs effectively. You need a system that scales as easily as possible to accomodate growth in your business. We provide you with a solid architecture, a rule set, and a design based on that rule set to give you the flexibility you need to scale efficiently.

Intrusion Detection Engineering and Support 
Alawy Intrusion Detection Services (IDS) Engineering and Support helps you design, deploy, and tune IDS implementations. We educate you on the proper review process for alerts. We assist with IDS training and response planning. We review reports with you as needed and supply organizations with a list of high, medium, and low threats as they arise. We can also simulate attacks to test and validate your IDS technology and response capability.

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Value to You

Protection and Containment 
We help you design an architecture with two goals. First, it helps prevent many attacks from occurring. Second, when they do occur, it minimizes the impact and contains the threat to a select group of systems.

Manageability 
Ultimately, you get a network with a more secure design, better equipped to detect security breaches, and consolidated so it’s easier to manage.

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How We Work

1. We scope the work. While some technical security assessments can be limited to vulnerability testing and penetration testing, incorporating the design and architecture of your network can provide a more comprehensive view of your risks, We work with your security and information officers to define the scope of the work you want us to undertake. We can also work with other companies if you’ve outsourced your security services.
2. We learn your goals and analyze the current state of your security. First and foremost, we make sure we understand your business goals. We want to make recommendations that are not only technically sound – but the best for your business. We look at your current policies. We review your network, technology, and security device architecture. We evaluate your disaster recovery practices. We focus on whether everything is consistent and complete.
3. We analyze data flows. We examine the inputs, throughputs, and outputs of your network, and specifically how data traverses it.  We look for points of ingress and egress for employees, customers, and business partners. Our experience encompasses performing reviews of the most complex networks for the largest companies and government agencies.
4. We assess your risk. Networks—which have many components and segments—are very porous. We look at how you’ve configured your network and how you’ve placed key security technologies such as firewalls, proxy-filters, and intrusion detection systems (IDS).  We can also measure your network’s resilience to denial-of-service attacks.
5. We measure your architecture against your goals. We interview executives and managers to determine if your architecture is on target with your business goals and strategy. We also determine if your design is representing the architecture efficiently.
6. We translate the goals into technical requirements. We develop a long-term strategy that maps the architecture you have now to what you need for the future.

   We can implement the strategy for you. Or we can work with you on a pilot project to transfer to your staff or a third-party the knowledge they need. 

How Long It Takes Analyzing and developing a plan for the entire architecture and design of your system can take from three to six weeks.

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The Results

An Improved, Secure Network Design 
A good solution is the right solutions for you only if it fits your system architecture. We give you the right architecture for your business and security goals—and make it possible for you to take advantage of the best possible solutions.

Enhanced Event-Detection Capabilities 
Our thorough probing of your system provides you with both a better understanding of your vulnerabilities and a better ability to identify the first signs of an attack.

Resilience 
If your business requirement is 99.9% secure uptime, you need the marriage of good architecture, good design, and strong controls to achieve it. Design takes into account not just technology—but principles, policies, and standards. Architecture gives the instructions for creating the design. Realizing the design requires not just a knowledge of security technology on our part—but an understanding of your business goals and an appreciation of your organization.

Tailored Communications 
We tailor our recommendations to speak clearly and effectively to the people they affect. We provide executive summaries for decision makers—and the specialized details that give your technical staff the information they need to fix the problems we uncover.

Tailored Recommendations Ranked by Cost and Effort 
We rank our recommendations. We know everyone has a limited security budget. We identify the improvements that are best for your business—and rank our recommendations accordingly. We help you prioritize your spending: we do a cost-benefit analysis of each recommendation and identify which are easiest and least expensive—and will produce the most effective results.

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Why Alawy

Alawy has worked to secure the networks of Fortune 500 companies in the financial, energy, insurance, media and consumer goods sector in the United States. A significant amount of this experience has been within the financial services and banking sectors—assessing infrastructure security and architecting and deploying secure solutions. We participate in the FBI's InfraGard as advisers in threat and security matters.

Our Security Consultants are Software Engineers trained in Information Security. They understand systems architecture. They see the whole picture. We’re not a software company limited to our own line of products. We provide our clients with the solution that best fits their business and budget needs. We do not cater to a "one size fits all" approach. Our focus is on protecting the sensitive information you are trusted to safeguard -- information belonging to your business and your clients -- from malicious theft or careless mishandling.

Security isn't just about security; it's about your business. We focus on providing solutions tailored to your corporate goals and the real threats you face. Read about Our Approach - the foundation for all our work.

Focus on your business:

• We help you stay competitive. We use our knowledge and experience to benchmark your risk against your industry.
• We value actions by their consequences. Our focus is consequences, not just risk.
• We focus on our relationship with our customers. Our goal is to be your trusted security advisor.
• We provide recommendations that are vendor independent to give you the freedom to implement the solution that suits you best.
• We help you stay competitive. Our business is security, not just consulting.

• We have a wide variety of clients in a broad range of industries. That exposes us to the need for many different architectures, designs, and solutions.
• Our consultants are IT security professionals who’ve worked with Fortu/clients/index.jspin the financial, energy, insurance, media and consumer goods industries.
• Our team of consultants is made up of Certified Information System Security Professionals (CISSPs).

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