With security at the forefront of every IT leader's mind, it's easy to question whether or not your firewall is catching everything. The complimentary Dell SonicWALL Application Risk Management Report (SWARM) could be just the validation you need to make an executive-level business case for your security priorities. After 1 week of traffic data, we can give you feed back on how your firewall is performing.
What exactly does a SWARM Report measure?
The SonicWALL Application Risk Management (SWARM) Report is a snapshot in time of the different threats that have been identified as a risk to your network infrastructure. This report also provides application and user based data that includes top application traffic, top users, top URL categories and session counts to give insight into the traffic mix on your network.
Why should my business have a SWARM assessment done?
Each and every day there are a variety of threats to a business’s network. Some are blocked by current network settings, but many reach inside of our networks and to our servers and user computers. Just because we don’t see a problem, doesn’t mean our network hasn’t been breached. The majority of the intrusions we see are not intended to damage the network, but rather simply to provide the intruder access to the network and data as needed.
What other benefits do SWARM Reports provide businesses?
The tool also gives us a high-level view of the users and applications that are accessing resources on the internet. How the bandwidth is being used. Most businesses do not perform any content filtering or have any prioritizing of bandwidth usage.
What problems/issues do SWARM Reports reveal?
It will easily identify how the internet resources are being utilized. If external access to the network is being achieved, we can evaluate if this is an approved access or an intruder into the system. An employee accessing his data files from an off-site location may be approved, while an intruder hacking into the systems is recognized threat.
If unauthorized or non-business applications are running across the network, this tool will identify what those are so they can be addressed. Social media access by unauthorized users is a big bandwidth hog; employees watching movies or videos can slow down whole networks.
What are the steps involved from submission of the online SWARM Report request form to completion?
Once a request is made, Cyber Advisors will schedule with your company’s IT management to come on-site and install our SWARM appliance. In most cases, it is simply “plug and play.” We would just need access to the first internet entry into the network.
About a week later, we will retrieve the activity data from the appliance and begin the report preparation. Likely, at this same time, we will remove the appliance from the network.
