Security Consultancy
Helping You Succeed
It can be challenging for organisations to dedicate the appropriate time and expertise required to improve their security. i-confidential’s broad range of security consultancy services can help.
Our team consists of highly experienced practitioners, many with direct operational experience in businesses at the leading edge of security.
We also have a proven track record of supporting clients with complex security projects covering definition, design, and delivery.
Below are some examples of areas where we help our clients meet their security improvement goals.
Security Awareness
There is a 'human element' to many security issues within organisations. While this is sometimes malicious, often the problem stems from a lack of colleague awareness.
Our understanding of what can go wrong has enabled us to develop an approach to shaping how organisations proactively engage their teams about security. This ensures they are taking the right steps to mitigate ‘human security risks’.
This can include:
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Design, development, and measurement of an awareness programme.
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Deployment support.
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Simulations to help people test and embed appropriate behaviour.
Policies & Standards
Having the right structure in place is key for an organisation, both in establishing its security risk ‘appetite’ and ensuring it has supporting documents that are clear, concise, and contain the appropriate level of information.
This can include:
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A set of ‘vanilla’ documents that can be tailored to reflect an organisation's security appetite. We can also review and enhance any pre-existing documentation.
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Ensuring clear and concise language throughout to help guide people to effectively implement any required security controls.
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Embedding industry-aligned frameworks.
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Documenting security ‘rules of play’ attuned to how an organisation conducts business.
Security and IT Control Design and Implementation
Aligned to policy and standards, controls set out the ‘operational procedures’ to successfully run an organisation's security and IT estate.
This can include:
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Documenting any required controls.
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Supporting the roll out and implementation of new controls.
Interim Leadership
A number of our experienced security practitioners have held senior security roles.
They can step in to fill key leadership positions on an interim basis and help clients with any challenges they might be facing. This provides confidence, reassurance, and the ability to progress with security improvements while an organisation secures a suitable long-term placement.
We can cover a variety of roles including CISOs and senior risk leaders.
Playbook Simulations
As organisations seek to improve their ability to respond to a ‘significant event’ we have developed a range of testing simulations. Our playbooks are designed to help improve 'muscle memory' so that teams are better equipped to cope when managing a real incident.
This can include:
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Documenting key incident response scenarios.
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Running the various flavours of simulation to test an organisation’s response readiness.
Security Remediation
We have developed an approach to simplifying complex security remediation programmes, irrespective of the types of assets or the weaknesses that need to be addressed.
This can include:
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A step-by-step approach to defining remediation programmes.
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A triage method for effective prioritisation.
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Optimised roles and responsibilities.
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Effective MI identifying remediation blockers.
This approach has been used successfully in a number of security remediation areas:
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Privileged Access – determining how much privileged access control a client could afford across a large volume of privileged accounts.
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Vulnerability Management – identifying a client's priority set of vulnerabilities and their owners to enable rapid mobilisation of remediation activities.
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Firewall Rules – assisting a client with a significant number of firewall rule violations, we delivered a target operating model that defined robust procedures and responsibilities to address root cause control failures.
Asset Management
A good asset inventory is critical for effective security management.
Security controls will be missing from systems that are not in the inventory.
Without a record of asset criticality, security improvement programmes and day-to-day activities, such as incident response, cannot be prioritised.
To support this key foundation of good security we have defined:
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A set of asset management capability requirements.
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Improvement roadmaps for meeting these requirements.
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Partner suppliers that can facilitate automated asset discovery.
This approach has been used successfully in a number of remediation areas:
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Third-Party Connections – by mapping all items from other inventories together (e.g. network devices, firewall rules, connected servers, apps etc.), we helped a client create a third-party inventory that identified a large number of connections for the first time.
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Automated Network Discovery – we used network discovery to find all the server and other device gaps in a client's configuration management database (CMDB).
