30 June 2019
Macnamara and LuJam
Macnamara has been involved with Cyber Essentials since the start, first becoming a certification body in April 2015, a few months after the scheme launched. We see the Cyber Essentials approach as a fantastic way for small businesses to achieve greatly improved security within their limited time and resource budgets. This is true whether they go for certification or not: we always advise that they do, after all they have done the work and might as well have the recognition to go with it.
One weakness though that we have been conscious of with Cyber Essentials is the risk of a false sense of security. In our experience, small businesses often approach the initial readiness process with great enthusiasm – especially if they are going for certification. The problem is that certification at both the self and externally assessed levels only covers a specific point in time. It can be hard to maintain the enthusiasm to make sure controls are kept in place once the certification buzz has passed. We have found that pressing immediate needs of the moment often lead to people overriding or even removing controls altogether.
We were very excited therefore when we came across the Lujam’s continuous monitoring approach. There are, of course, plenty of monitoring tools around but most are beyond the technical skills or budgets of our small business clientele. And, like all MSPs, we have our own suite of monitoring tools. But these are focussed on system support and maintenance rather than security. The LuJam sensor and service perfectly plugs the gap, giving us an affordable approach to monitoring client environments specifically around the five Cyber Essentials security controls.
It is easy for us to build LuJam into our service for existing clients as in most cases they are already paying for a variety of tools we use to protect them – several of which we can replace with LuJam. And, for new clients, LuJam provides us with a means of creating a big impression quickly.
For those clients to whom we have explained the benefits we have encountered precisely zero resistance – especially as we are able to onboard them at very low cost. In our first month as a Lujam partner we have found homes for the LuJam sensor in financial management, manufacturing and a counselling practice.
One particularly interesting (for us) use case is in a factory where we have VLAN’d the industrial control systems apart from the office network with some monitoring traffic passing from the control system network to the main office network and a limited requirement for external support companies to access the control systems. As we have no computers (in the traditional sense) on the control system network we were stumped for a cost-effective way of monitoring this network, LuJam provides a perfect mechanism for doing so. We know precisely what traffic should be on that network and we can use LuJam to quickly alert us to anything unusual.
LuJam also provided the answer to another conundrum. A client had sublet part of their office building but wanted to be able to keep a light touch eye on traffic in and out of the sublet network in the sense of wanting to know how much bandwidth was being consumed and making sure that nothing questionable was happening on their publicly identifiable IP address. LuJam allows to implement some very light tough and non-intrusive monitoring to satisfy this requirement.
If you would like an online demonstration of the LuJam Cyber solution please contact chris@lujam.com or call +44 (0)117 373 6186 and ask for Chris ref. online demo.
