Services

Audit Tools:

It’s nice to think you have your firewall, antivirus, acceptable use policy and SOE policy. Everything should be covered right? But how do you know if it’s really working?

Well there is no real silver bullet answer but you should at least be able to keep an eye on some of the basic things; like who has been logging on from home, when staff logged on, for how long staff logged on as well as whether anybody is attempting to gain access to your system, by guessing user names and passwords (Brute force attack).

To combat these issue Nexview Systems has developed an inexpensive way for supervisors, to proactively self manage access to their network. The Authentication Event Analyzer can generate a simple to understand audit report of login - log off and failed login activity. With a simple click the user can see who has logged in and out of their cooperate network. Say Tom Brown tried to log in 200 times at midnight last night, this could be a potential attacker trying to guess Tom’s password! Tom might also have logged on for 3 hours last night when he is supposed to be on holidays. This is just some of the valuable information that can be obtained with The Authentication Event Analyzer. This tool works best for organizations with a single Active Directory Domain Controller running Microsoft Terminal Services. However it can be easily adapted to various kinds of Network Topology on discussion with our Engineers.  

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Performance Reports:

NEXview Systems has created a robust performance monitoring framework using the built in tools of your Microsoft Windows Server. We offer our “performance monitor and baseline analysis suite”. This inolves our engineers monitoring key operational areas over a period of usage and producing a detailed analysis of your Servers performance. We then outline any anomalies and make recommendations. If server health is good and no further action is needed the report is used as a baseline for future reporting.

The performance monitors we base our reporting on are:

• Hard Disk performance.
• Processor performance.
• Memory performance.
• Network performance.

As a client you get a detailed picture of what your server is doing and how changes over time have impacted on load. This is laid out in a 10 page report with a graphical representation, explaining each of the above monitors in a simple, easy to understated language.  The biggest advantage being that when it's time to upgrade a particular server component e.g. more RAM, you have a performance evaluation justification, not just your network administrator's word to go by.

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Management:

Remote Monitoring is a proactive, network monitoring service designed to identify any system errors prior to them interrupting a client's business operations.

Remote Monitoring checks for network and server faults, failures, and activity that exceeds established thresholds. As an example:

• CPU utilisation on key servers.
• Memory utlisation on key servers.
• Hard disk capacity on key servers.
• Average number of user connections.
• Server error messages.
• Running processes and Services.
• Trends across key items such as CPU, RAM and Disk usage.
• Email monitoring, Spam filtering.
• Virus and spyware monitoring.
• Secure content management.

We provide solutions to help you recover quickly from unforeseen events that shut down your critical business systems. We will tailor our disaster recovery services to meet your specific requirements. A proactive disaster recovery plan is key to the long term success of your business.

Prior to creation of the plan itself, it is essential to consider the potential impacts of disaster and to understand the underlying risks: these are the foundations upon which a sound business continuity plan or disaster recovery plan should be built. Following these activities the plan itself must be constructed - no small task. This itself must then be maintained, tested and audited to ensure that it remains appropriate to the ever changing needs of the organization.

Having determined the impacts, it is now equally important to consider the magnitude of the risks which could result in these impacts. Again, this is a critical activity - it will determine which scenarios are most likely to occur and which should attract most attention during the planning process.

Plan – The first step in a sensible business continuity process is to consider the potential impacts of each type of disaster or event. This is a very critical stage in the planning process as it will determine the success and how much impact the recovery process will have on a business in the unlikely event of a disaster to occur. Develop and maintain a recovery plan by identifying the key business processes, hourly cost of not having them available, mapping them to the applications, then mapping the applications to the IT infrastructure. This area also covers the steps to take after a disaster.

Protect – Ensure that regular back-ups are executed on a regular basis so that any data changes or updates are copied to a tape to ensure most recent data is duplicated. Always make sure the backups are never in the same location as the original data. This will ensure that in case of a fire the backed up media will be safely stored off location and away from the danger.

Recover – In some cases recovering that data from media is only part of the process. Firstly, new hardware which might have been damaged needs to be replaced, configured and put into the exact working order it was before the incident. Software will also need to be re-installed, configured and in some cases updated to synchronize with hardware replacements. Next stage is to retrieve offsite storage media and re-install data from the tapes. Final stage is to check for authenticity and enter into system any updates since last backup was created.

Some of the options NEXview  Systems provide are:

• Custom scripts to copy data periodically to another server during the hours of work.
• Tape Backup of data and systems files.
• Creating ASR disks and backup of operating systems files to tape for none booting systems.
• RAID, Short for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, a category of disk drives that employ two or more drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance. RAID disk drives are used frequently on servers but aren't generally necessary for personal computers.
• Adaptec Snap Servers for large storage of critical data that must be available at all times.
• Failover systems using CA software.
• UPS's.
• Creating images of Notebooks.

Definitions of RAID levels:

• Level 0 -- Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.
• Level 1 -- Mirroring and Duplexing: Provides disk mirroring. Level 1 provides twice the read transaction rate of single disks and the same write transaction rate as single disks.
• Level 2 -- Error-Correcting Coding: Not a typical implementation and rarely used, Level 2 stripes data at the bit level rather than the block level.
• Level 3 -- Bit-Interleaved Parity: Provides byte-level striping with a dedicated parity disk. Level 3, which cannot service simultaneous multiple requests, also is rarely used.
• Level 4 -- Dedicated Parity Drive: A commonly used implementation of RAID, Level 4 provides block-level striping (like Level 0) with a parity disk. If a data disk fails, the parity data is used to create a replacement disk. A disadvantage to Level 4 is that the parity disk can create write bottlenecks.
• Level 5 -- Block Interleaved Distributed Parity: Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance. Level 5 is one of the most popular implementations of RAID.
• Level 6 -- Independent Data Disks with Double Parity: Provides block-level striping with parity data distributed across all disks.
• Level 0+1 – A Mirror of Stripes: Not one of the original RAID levels, two RAID 0 stripes are created, and a RAID 1 mirror is created over them. Used for both replicating and sharing data among disks.
• Level 10 – A Stripe of Mirrors: Not one of the original RAID levels, multiple RAID 1 mirrors are created, and a RAID 0 stripe is created over these.
• Level 7: A trademark of Storage Computer Corporation that adds caching to Levels 3 or 4.
• RAID S: EMC Corporation's proprietary striped parity RAID system used in its Symmetric storage systems.