The unglamorous half of security is knowing which computers you own, keeping them current, and noticing when one goes quiet. Four circuits cover the Windows machines, the Macs, the browsing that happens on both, and the handsets your staff approve payments from.
An honest tally of small firm incidents would put a large share of them down to a machine missing an update that has been on offer for months. It is a boring failure and it makes a poor headline, which is very probably why so much of this market prefers to talk about anything else.
N-able N-sight puts updates on a timetable arranged around the hours you trade, watches disk and hardware health, and tells us when a machine stops reporting. That last one carries more weight than it sounds: a computer absent from the network for six weeks has either gone for good, or is about to come back carrying whatever it picked up while unobserved.
Windows machines take the monitoring, the updates and the remote hands. Macs are not Windows boxes with better lids, and handling them as though they were is how a Mac fleet ends up unencrypted and two versions behind. Handled the way Apple intends, which is what Addigy does, they do not.
Handsets are the surface people forget outright. Payments get approved from a phone in a car park, and that phone holds your post. The deciding happens on the device itself under Zimperium, with the contents of nobody's phone shipped away to be picked over.
Prices below arrive straight out of billing. Whatever gets patched in waits on the list while you read on.
The tedious work that heads off most of the trouble. Updates land, disks get watched, and somebody notices a machine that stopped reporting, rather than discovering three weeks later that it never rebooted after the last round.
| Patched to | N-able N-sight |
|---|---|
| Listens on | Update state, disk and hardware health, and installed software |
| Line held | A machine inventory that stays current |
| Answered by | Fortify 24x7 operators, on update rounds and on failed checks |
| Traced by | One managed device, charged monthly |
Filtering carried by software the machine already has. No box to rack, nothing to reconfigure when somebody works from the kitchen table. A name pointing at a known bad destination never gets as far as a connection.
| Patched to | N-able N-sight, from the same agent |
|---|---|
| Listens on | The names a device asks to look up before connecting anywhere |
| Line held | Your category policy and whatever exceptions sit on top of it |
| Answered by | Fortify 24x7 operators, on category changes and unblock requests |
| Traced by | One managed device, charged monthly |
Macs are not Windows boxes with better lids. Treat them as such and you end up with a Mac fleet two versions behind and no idea whether the disks are encrypted. Addigy handles enrolment, settings and updates the way Apple expects.
| Patched to | Addigy |
|---|---|
| Listens on | Settings, update state and disk encryption on Mac hardware |
| Line held | Enrolment, plus the profiles pushed to each machine |
| Answered by | Fortify 24x7 operators, for enrolment, policy and remote work |
| Traced by | One Apple device, charged monthly |
Payments get approved from a phone in a car park. That phone is a computer holding your mail, and hardly anybody watches it. The deciding happens on the handset under Zimperium, with the contents of the phone sent nowhere for examination.
| Patched to | Zimperium |
|---|---|
| Listens on | The handset itself, covering apps, network and operating system state |
| Line held | Detection history for each enrolled handset |
| Answered by | Action on the device itself, with our operators reading whatever turned up |
| Traced by | One mobile device, charged monthly |
This position earns its keep and it has edges. Set out below is the ground these circuits leave uncovered, plainly enough to plan around.
Heads up: card statements show FORTIFY 24X7 - CyberSec Managed is a Fortify 24x7 brand, and your subscription is billed by Fortify 24x7.