NEC XON's Decypher helps SMEs resolve their biggest IT challenges

Brad Kewney, regional head of coastal regions at NEC XON.

---

NEC XON Western Cape has launched Decypher, a new managed and shared service to help small to medium-sized (SME) businesses overcome their biggest and most common IT-related challenges.

Decypher is a cloud-based software as a service and security network management service specifically for the SME market.

“The biggest SME challenges are limited access to skilled resources, understanding what drives network performance or lack thereof, security and how that constrains their business operations and growth potential,” says Brad Kewney, regional head of Coastal regions at NEC XON. “We have a service that helps them unlock that mystery so they can generate a clear picture and we help them to be efficient, grow, secure their environment and create business resilience.”

This is the only service of its kind in the country designed for the SME. It helps businesses analyse their networks, understand the complete environment, manage it effectively through a single pane and garner a number of resultant benefits.

Competitor services do not give SMEs the flexibility nor the functionality they often need. For example, they may be limited to retaining logs for only seven days, have limited reporting, limited visibility into network operations, traffic and network health.

NEC XON’s Decypher is a 24x7 service that flexibly adapts to the SME’s specific needs. The service provides standard packages based on the number of users, the amount of data that can be retained and the reports it provides. However, it can be adapted based on the length for which the data must be kept and adjusted according to different storage requirements, as well as other services the business may need.

“The service you get from Decypher is usually reserved for larger businesses,” says Kewney. However, we’ve worked closely with our internal architects and vendor partners to create this flexible service based on enterprise-grade solutions, powered by FortiNet’s FortiAnalyzer. We manage the customer’s network devices, ingesting them into our environment without accessing their client data. That stays in their domain and even the log files are stored in South Africa, so it’s fully POPI compliant. What we do is pull only the relevant data to create a single pane of glass for them to analyse and report on their complete environment with all the requisite storage and availability around that.”

Grant Ferreira, security solutions engineer architect at NEC XON.

---

The single pane view into the business’s network has a number of benefits, including simplifying management, improving security, reducing operational overheads and reducing costs, says Kewney.

The data is encrypted, connects securely and does not impact the customer’s connectivity. Decypher is fully redundant since it is designed in a high availability (HA) stack of mirrored devices via a virtual environment. It is a shared environment, which is one of the methods used to reduce costs. However, it uses FortiGate Virtual Domains that provide separate firewall policies and even completely separate configurations for routing and VPN services for each connected network or organisation.

Ops people get customisable network operations centre (NOC) and security operations centre (SOC) dashboards and widgets designed for display across multiple screens. They monitor events in real-time through predefined dashboard views for SD-WAN, VPN, WiFi, incoming/outgoing traffic, applications and websites, FortiSandbox detections, endpoint vulnerabilities, software inventory, top threats, shadow IT monitoring, ZTNA and many more.

“Decypher provides a comprehensive monitoring solution with multiple levels of views and summaries of critical alerts in real-time,” says Grant Ferreira, security solutions engineer architect at NEC XON. “The relevant admins and people in the business can now see their top threats and indicators of compromise (IOC) to their network. That includes botnet and command and control (C&C), top sources and destinations of network traffic, top applications, websites and software as a service (SaaS), VPN and system information, and other intelligence from the network.”