Partner Newsletter August 2022

Dear ,

The summer vacations are in full swing and it is noticeable that staffing levels at partners and their customers are a lot lower. Unfortunately this does not apply to criminal organizations: after a period in which it was relatively quiet in the area of ransomware, we have seen a sharp increase in incidents in recent weeks.

Recent research shows that criminals are now scanning for vulnerabilities within 15 minutes of becoming aware of them, so they can exploit them. Another confirmation for us that daily scanning is essential.

Fortunately, more and more managed services providers and IT service providers recognize that they need to provide additional security, the interest in Guardian360's services continues to grow. However, in order to know what to protect, you first need to know what assets exist within the organization. That's why we delivered the new "Assets" functionality this month, you can read more about it in this newsletter.

Also in this newsletter, UX Developer Martin gives another update on the development of the future version of the Guardian360 Lighthouse platform. We address the NIS2 directive, a new European regulation that will have a lot of impact on IT service providers.

Finally, we remind you of the Saas4Channel "Borrelcast", Guardian360 will sponsor the September edition. Do I see you there?

Enjoy the rest of your summertime!

On behalf of the Guardian360 team,

Jan Martijn Broekhof

Managing Director

Lighthouse update

In August, we released the "Assets" functionality. This functionality was made available to partners and customers immediately and as part of existing subscriptions without additional costs.

With this functionality, our partners have insight into the amount of assets detected during our scans. The numbers of assets per customer are visible, but it is also possible to see the numbers of assets for all customers combined. This is useful when, for example, a bundle has been purchased that is divided over multiple customers. In addition, it is also possible to see per asset how many vulnerabilities Guardian360 Lighthouse has detected.

We also fixed an issue:
Fix: Convert characters that can cause formatting problems while exporting issues to CSV.

Lighthouse 2.0

The fast pace of technology dictates that to be successful we need to be able to adapt to change and be ever evolving in our product offering. We need only look at the speed of Microsoft and Apple’s releases to see what a successful release cycle looks like.

There are many competitors who are passionate about innovation and offering practical solutions to clients. If we do not match that passion and excellence, then we will miss out and will remain small fish in a big pond.

Our product requires us to meet the demand head on. It requires us to listen to our clients and adapt accordingly. It requires us to be more organized, be more efficient, more productive.

For this reason, we are optimizing our processes and documentation so that we can build this into our architecture from the ground up, in Lighthouse 2.0.

Lighthouse 2.0 will open many possibilities and add speed to our development process by:

capitalizing on the successes in our platform
learning from our experience and making improvements
harnessing the latest technology
providing solutions that disrupt the status quo

Lighthouse 2.0 is already in development.

Some great work has been done this quarter to move our database to run within the cloud using Kubernetes. There have also been decisions made and research done into future technologies for the back end and future data structures.

We are also exploring various front-end frameworks and have been experimenting with Angular, React and Vue.js. High on our agenda is how scalable the solution is, the speed of development, observability within the system and testing. We are still in the process of finalizing this, but the results look promising.

In our front-end research process, we discovered https://www.primefaces.org/ which provides a rich component library that works across each of the JavaScript platforms. They are quite established and well maintained and will provide us with less dependencies and minimize the need to create components so that we can focus on features instead.

Some of the promising features include graphs for reporting, timelines, complex tables and tree structures.

The results of this research should soon be finalized and presented at our Q4 roadmap. Q4 will also see us implementing our first features on the new platform which should be ready to demonstrate in Q1 of 2023.

Thank you to our everyone who has met with me to help us improve and redefine our product.

As always, we look forward to hearing from you and collaborating in the future. Feel free to set up via de button below.

Yours sincerely,

Martin Hugo

Results Q3 Platinum Partners Roadmap Consultation Questionnaire

On Monday, July 4, we organized the 3rd Roadmap Consultation with the Platinum partners of 2022. Based on the questionnaire we sent afterwards, we learned that there is a need for these 5 features in Guardian360 Lighthouse:

Disable specific scanners on specific scan objects
Scan object exclusions alternative range (not only x.x.x.y-x.x.x.z but comma-separated as well)
Generic demo environment for partners
Overview of unique issues Lighthouse ever found
Improve probe deployment (on Azure)

We aim to deliver the functionality that allows Partners to disable specific scanners on specific scan objects this quarter. Depending on how well the development proceeds, we will immediately make it possible to disable scanning on specific ports of a scan object for a specific scanner.

The ability to enter exclusions differently is also something we want to take into account when developing the 'Disable specific scanners on specific scan objects'. This is depending on if there is still time for that this quarter.

The Guardian360 team is currently working on a Business Requirement Specification (BRS) to easily provide partners with a generic demo environment. We expect to present the BRS to our Platinum Partners for review within the next few weeks.

A BRS has yet to be written for the insights into all the unique issues ever found by Lighthouse. We are not confident that we will be able to complete this task this quarter.

Some improvements have already been made to the probe deployment on Azure in the past period. As mentioned in the previous partner newsletter, the Azure Linux agent has been added to the probes. Meanwhile, we are also working to ensure that partners have more visibility into the status of the probe via the terminal. We aim to deliver this functionality this quarter as well.

Guardian360 sponsor of SaaS4Channel Borrelcast

On September 15, Guardian360 will sponsor the SaaS4Channel Borrelcast. The Podcast is a combination of a networking event and an interactive live recording of 2 podcasts.

Both the drinks and the podcast are especially for and by ICT entrepreneurs and will mainly focus on entrepreneurial topics. On behalf of Guardian360 Jan Martijn Broekhof will be interviewed, who the second guest will be is still a surprise. Do you want to be present at the networking reception and recording? Then sign up using the button below!

THE NIS2 DIRECTIVE

The European Parliament announced a "provisional agreement" aimed at improving cybersecurity and resilience of both public and private sector entities in the European Union. The revised directive, called "NIS2" (short for network and information systems), is expected to replace the existing legislation on cybersecurity that was established in July 2016.

In the near future, organizations with more than 50 employees and more than 10 million in turnover in various sectors (including financial, health and government institutions) must be able to demonstrate that they comply with the new directive. There is work to be done digitally, because the security requirements are going up: the necessary measures are becoming more explicit, supervision of them is being tightened and the fines for non-compliance are rising substantially. In addition, it will be compulsory to look beyond one's own security risks. You also need to consider the risks in the relationships with suppliers in the supply chain (such as managed service providers).

Among the provisions in the new legislation are flagging cybersecurity incidents to authorities within 24 hours, patching software vulnerabilities, and readying risk management measures to secure networks, failing which can incur monetary penalties.

The directive will not apply to organizations in verticals such as defense, national security, public security, law enforcement, judiciary, parliaments, and central banks.

As part of the proposed agreement, the European Union member states are mandated to incorporate the provisions into their national law. It is now up to the member states to translate the European directive into local legislation. They have 18 months to do so.

In other words, in 2023 European companies will have to deal with it.