The offering is a combination of an onsite appliance and SaaS-based management and monitoring. The appliance delivers 24/7/365 live management and monitoring; automatic daily updates of configurations, software and IDS signature updates; 99.99 percent monitoring center uptime; 24/7/365 access to secure, web-based customer portal; 24/7/365 phone and email access to security analysts; 24/7/365 real-time live monitoring and reaction to all intrusion incident alerts, including email notification of intrusion attempts and incident reviews within 10 minutes.
Full change management and ticket-tracking capabilities are included. Changes and updates can be set up with various approval criteria built into the workflow. Incidents are automatically transferred from shift to shift. The client portal is roles-based for multiple levels of access control. The reporting is very strong.
One knock against outsourcing security is that the outsourced provider may not understand your environment as well as an internal employee. The methodology and process that was described to us during our review was very impressive.
Clients can make their own changes to any configurations, except the VPN service. The security operation center is available to make these changes on a 24/7 basis. We were also told that the 24/7 operation center provides a live interface rather than voice prompts.
Pricing depends on the scope of service. For example, monthly charges for a firewall/IPS combination are $650 per month. To add content filtering, anti-virus or anti-spam costs an additional $200-$275 per month per service.