Reliance acsn enhances its service by adding Highlight’s network and app monitoring and reporting

London-based global cyber security specialist Reliance acsn is enhancing its services with the addition of Highlight’s network and application monitoring and reporting.

Reliance acsn protects its customers’ information assets through the creation of risk profiles and firewall design alongside business-driven defined monitoring, early detection and rapid response.

With Highlight, Reliance acsn now has early warning of possible issues through greater visibility and understanding of network infrastructures and information flows across the 1,000 plus security devices it manages for over 80 customers on five continents.

James Dyson, Operations Director at Reliance acsn says, “Knowing what you have and how everything is performing is the essential foundation on which we can apply relevant and successful security measures for the assets that are most important to our customers.

“Having worked in Managed Security services for over 10 years, I immediately saw an opportunity to overlay Highlight on the security side of our services. It’s extremely powerful to see, at a glance, how data is transferring across the network and how application traffic is performing. With improved visibility and understanding, it’s far easier to spot anomalies.

“Like Reliance acsn, Highlight is vendor agnostic, we can select the best industry leading tools to protect our customers. We chose Highlight because they are small enough to react when we need support and have run a successful business long enough to be a trusted pair of hands.”

Reliance acsn works with large enterprise-level customers that have complicated networks in sectors such as banking, telecoms, retail, government, insurance and leisure. Highlight simulates user transactions and tests how these networks, including multiple locations and transactions, are performing in near real-time.

If there is an issue, Reliance acsn doesn’t have to wait for alerts, or worse still for the customer to notice. They can show the customer where something isn’t working and help them to troubleshoot.

James explains, “In the past, if there was an issue on the network, a customer would often blame the firewall in the first instance and could then spend days working with each of their suppliers to identify the cause.

“With Highlight, we can now give them full visibility of what is happening and be proactive in helping them to identify the problem, even though it may have nothing to do with security. Through monitoring and early detection, we can identify any abnormal patterns that may indicate a potential breach, enabling the customer to effectively police their own network.”

For example, Reliance acsn provides the firewall for a large UK sporting organisation. “They were delighted when we gave them additional insight into our services with Highlight.

“They could quickly and effectively see how their network was performing and enabled them to identify that backups scheduled for Sunday lunchtimes would coincide with major match days. This unnecessary strain on the system was quickly rectified maximising performance without compromising security.”

For central government, Reliance acsn manages the perimeter security for this extensive IT environment. Highlight shows the whole journey of a transaction and what the user experience is likely to be. If a failure occurs, Reliance acsn can demonstrate value by pinpointing where they need to look to solve the issue.

For a car dealership group with multiple locations, departments and devices, Reliance acsn has end-to-end visibility of the network, with the ability to identify issues before they occur and affect business operations.

Concluding James says, “Security is a bit like insurance where customers invest in something they usually cannot see. With Highlight, we offer full transparency.

“We give customers access to their own area of the Highlight portal so they can be reassured that we are constantly watching over their network and firewall. This enables us to build partnerships rather than just having a supplier and customer relationship.”