Fortify

Includes a comprehensive and tailored solution that is purpose-built for lower middle market PE firms to manage risk, preserve value, and protect against business-impacting incidents and ongoing management of your cybersecurity program.

Future Proofing Your Portfolio Investment

Portfolio companies that take a “do it yourself ” approach to defend against the cybersecurity threat landscape, are taking on unnecessary risk. The industry statistics and the ever more aggressive focus on ransomware attacks only reinforce what’s at stake. According to the Cyber Readiness Institute, 67% of SMBs fail to survive a cyber breach, 56% of organizations suffered a security breach caused by a 3rd party with the average cost of a data breach exceeding $4M.

At IT Ally, we help future proof your portfolio company investments and preserve their value. Based on extensive experience partnering with lower middle marker private equity firms and our risk advisory expertise, we have created the Fortify solution to to eliminate business impacting risk. We partner with leadership teams and investors to manage risk with confidence and free up internal resources to focus on serving customers and driving growth and innovation.

SOLUTION COMPONENTS

​Our Fortify solution includes a bundled set of capabilities delivered as a managed service that spans advisory and management to network and security operations. The combination of the strategic advisory from IT Ally and the operational expertise from our proven partners , provides an unmatched end to end solution to proactively manage risk and preserve value.

CYBER ALLY SERVICES

Includes expert resources to guide your C-Suite and IT team, monitor changes in the threat landscape and ensure the organization understands the status of the risk and control environment.

Ensure cybersecurity policies are in place and people and processes are in compliance along with a cybersecurity roadmap to improve your cybersecurity capabilities.

Regularly review your cybersecurity controls, collect evidence and identify and manage compliance gaps and remediation plans.

Meet regularly with the internal IT team and business stakeholders to review operations performance and monitor the effectiveness of the security program.

Monitor, automate, and report regularly on the performance of your cybersecurity program.

Self-assessment that identifies the root causes of Tech Debt 2.0® and assigns a rating of Excellent, Good, Fair or Poor.

Includes identifying cybersecurity and IT infrastructure risks, evaluating risk mitigation alternatives, and supporting clients in mitigating such risks.

Provides executive advisory services and oversees the Fortify Program services.

SECURITY OPERATIONS CENTER

Next-generation firewalls utilize purpose-built security processors and threat intelligence to deliver top-rated protection and high performance including encrypted traffic.

Protection against inbound attacks with a range of security capabilities, including anti-spam, sandboxing, and encryption.

Cybersecurity awareness training and phishing campaigns for all employees.

Vulnerability visibility, impact, and remediation recommendations.

Workstation and server patches applied as required with Client engagement.

Endpoint anti-virus security using artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify malware before execution.

Protect devices against data loss and theft with full-disk encryption & encryption management.

Next-Generation Firewall capabilities including security, visibility, and control, made available at the endpoint level.

Collect & analyze behavioral data to identify signs of an attack without relying on the presence of malicious files.

Cross-platform log collection, aggregation, and analysis.

Monitoring and reporting on compromised credentials.

NETWORK OPERATIONS CENTER

Manage your day-to-day Azure cloud and Office 365 operations.

Proactive Server/Virtualization monitoring and initial event triage.

Proactive Network monitoring and initial event triage.

Proactive SAN/NAS monitoring and initial event triage.

Proactive Backup monitoring and initial event triage for Backup job success and failures.

Proactive Infrastructure Application Monitoring and initial event triage.

Authentication and authorization for your AD-dependent workloads, AD server maintenance and security configuration.

“Private equity backed lower middle market portfolio companies have emerged as the new targets for ransomware and government sponsored hacking, we are seeing many of our clients shift their position on risk tolerance in the cybersecurity arena. We advise our private equity partners to defer public announcements on new portfolio company acquisitions until the appropriate capabilities are implemented as they are a prime target of threat actors. These companies have typically under-invested in this area and having appropriate cybersecurity protection on day 1 and beyond is paramount to preservingthe valuate of their investment. . Our Fortify solution provides the resources, expertise, tools and capabilities tolevel the playing field against the evolving cybersecurity threat landscape.”

Michael FilliosFounder & CEO, IT Ally

“The Fortify solution represents a perfect union of the capabilities of our two companies. With staggering statistics such as 60% of companies going out of business within 6 months of experiencing a security breach and, 74% of companies not getting their data back after paying a ransom, we consider cybersecurity to be the primary threat to the success of any company in the SMB space.”

Wayne KiphartCEO, Ascend Technologies

Contact Us

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For more information about Ascend Technologies, please visit teamascend.com.