Problems Solved

GAIN immediate insight and control of privileged users, contractors and service accounts

PROTECT critical resources, intellectual property and regulated data enterprise-wide

VERIFY and extend system, application, message, file and database acceptable usage policy

ACCELERATE investigation, reporting, governance and audit processes

RAPIDLY DEPLOY – unobtrusive appliance platforms without agents or log integration

ENGAGE high-speed deep packet analysis, user activity correlation and policy control at LAN-speed

High-Risk User Monitoring

To remain competitive, businesses often employ consultants, temporary workers and engage outsourcing partners to add specialized skills sets or to leverage the efficiencies of lower cost labor pools. These important members of a company’s extended family are normally granted access to your company’s network, systems and applications – with rights and privileges similar to members of your full time employee roster.

Surprisingly, most companies fail or have inadequate means to monitor and control high-risk users to ensure that they never access, read or write information that is outside the scope of their responsibilities. PacketMotion offers its clients strategies for collecting, correlating and controlling information about contractors’ use of the network including:

Which files and directories are contractors accessing?
What activities are these untrusted users performing to those files?
Which databases are non-permanent employees using and why?
What are these users doing with chat, email, document management systems, and other applications?

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Information Protection

Companies often worry that their employees and contractors taking home more than a paycheck and are looking for technologies to prevent intellectual property, compliance-regulated data or business sensitive information from walking out the door! It’s a slippery slope – restricting information access will help safeguard critical information assets yet will most assuredly hamper employee and consultant productivity. Without an automated platform to monitor and enforce IT Controls related to intellectual property, personally identifiable information and business sensitive data, companies never really know whether employees or contractors are actually following directives…and they are most assuredly blind to violations that place your most sensitive data and critical network resources at risk and create liability or material regulatory deficiencies.

PacketMotion delivers technology for defining, implementing and automating controls to ensure that corporate resources are being used in a manner consistent with corporate security, acceptable use, or code of conduct policies. With PacketSentry, clients quickly gain an automated system to:

Protect the access of sensitive data by unauthorized users
Track and restrict the movement of confidential data enterprise-wide
Restrict the movement of confidential information within corporate networks and across firewall
Ensure that acceptable-use policies are being rigorously followed
Identify and prevent high risk situations that could harm your business, relationships with partners and customers, or reputation
Address compliance challenges that focus on how privacy data is used, is stored, and traverses the network
Lower the cost to document due process and validate controls

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Trusted User Monitoring

Companies lack confidence in their ability to monitor and control insider access to information assets. Once trusted users gain authorized access to internal network resources it becomes very difficult for IT to efficiently trace seemingly legitimate activity, identify and investigate malicious or inappropriate transactions, and enforce data access and usage policies enterprise-wide. Furthermore, conducting operational audits, such as application use, system access, file share activity, entitlement faults, and problem determination is a time consuming, resource-intensive process that is a distraction to normal business operations. The key is to “Trust but verify.”™

PacketMotion offers a reliable means to monitor and control high-risk users to ensure that they never access, read or write information that is outside the scope of their responsibilities, specifically the ability to:

Identify internal threats, policy violations, and resource abuse
Prevent inappropriate system and sensitive data access
Conduct timely security audits and complete business investigations
Remediate entitlement, policy, and compliance exposures
Understand resource utilization and sensitive data access patterns
Produce more informative operational and compliance reports
Expedite problem resolution and infrastructure optimization

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Accelerating Investigations

Companies worry that they are blind to what happens 3 minutes after a user takes data off of a database or file share. It’s impossible to know if the user emailed it to a co-worker or used FTP to send it out of the company.

Even with layered defenses, automated entitlement provisioning, and event log collection options, IT staff still contends with exerting much time and effort to resolve identity and access issues – namely, who did what, when and how, and why did this happen given current safeguards? This identity and access management gap leaves risk to resource breach and downtime, sensitive data dissemination, as well as business and reputation risks. PacketMotion delivers a solution to help companies overcome critical gaps:

Variety and fragmented use of point monitoring and security systems that lack identity state
Difficulty and cost to assess user activity and sensitive data usage patterns
Inability to maintain evolving user entitlements, transaction policies, and appropriate application use enterprise-wide
Discovery and resolution of entitlement gaps created by omissions, errors, and silos of access control
Incomplete means to uniformly manage and readily enforce access and usage policy across systems, file shares, databases and applications

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Compliance

Companies want to reduce the amount of resource and time they allocate to satisfying SOX, ISO and PCI requirements. Failures in IT policies are leading indicators of failures of IT systems. Unless companies are using an automated platform to monitor and enforce IT and security controls, they never really know whether employees are actually following regulated and corporate policy directives. They have difficulty discovering service account abuse. Most importantly, companies are blind to violations that cause performance degradation, system outages and sensitive data access and misuse – and are more likely spending too much money on cumbersome manual audits.

PacketMotion assists clients in collecting, correlating and reporting compliance and governance information and validating controls that internal and external auditors require:

Monitor and control the deployment of mechanisms that restrict access based on a user’s need to know based upon their role in the organization.
Easily prove that to business critical computing resources and compliance-relevant information is restricted only to those individuals whose job requires such access.
Quickly identify any gaps in separation of duties between development, test, and production environments
Automatically guarantee that strong cryptography and approved applications are employed to safeguard resource access and sensitive data during transmission over open, public networks.

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Additional Use Cases

PacketMotion is also often employed for the following areas of benefit:

Activity Intelligence - Operators have immediate, real-time, and historical visibility into systems, application and data access - with full binding of user, group, and system associations. Operators can readily detect malicious, inappropriate, unauthorized, and anomalous network and data access behavior.
Seamless Acceptable Use Control - PacketSentry delivers a powerful, real-time identity access control solution to track and prevent insider access to information assets. Operators can readily implement strong secondary and compensating controls across systems, applications, messaging, file shares, and databases. This heterogeneous control is transparent and integrates with directory services. PacketSentry can also enforce application and resource whitelists and blacklists.
Privileged, Guest and Rogue User Monitoring - User activity is continuously monitored against known policies and action thresholds set against groups, systems, and application-permissible activities. Undocumented, rogue users and systems that gain internal network access can be immediately flagged, monitored, and even denied further access.
Assured Segregation of Access and Communications - PacketMotion can monitor or automatically restrict access, data use, and communications restrictions between segregated groups such as consultants, outsourced service providers, and transitory partners. This can expedite segregation verification, partnership dissolution or “Chinese wall” documentation.
Automated Auditing - PacketSentry provides a segregated record of activity while greatly reduces the more manual fraud, investigation, and policy validation efforts. The system enables immediate proof of due-care and policy adherence to satisfy or identify gaps among a variety of internal governance and external audit requirements. Built-in ISO 17799, COBIT and PCI monitoring and reporting capabilities facilitate tracking all access and usage of key network business resources.
Entitlement Coverage - PacketMotion removes the laborious understanding of application and data access patterns across users and groups by providing meaningful, detailed historic transaction records. This provides the means to assess provisioning plans and test updates. Operators can easily determine what the effect of a change in entitlement will mean to a given group, fileshare, database or network resource.
Problem Determination and Resource Optimization - PacketMotion can facilitate trending application and data usage by user or group whereby authorized applications, black-listed applications, anomalous application traffic, and file share use can be readily exposed and analyzed. To fortify remediation processes, the solution can identity suspicious activity and examine potential actions that led to system breach or downtime. IT staff can also reduce sensitive data being duplicated in multiple file shares by immediately seeing how sensitive data is being accessed and transmitted.

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