Managed security services
CyberCop ASaP employs PGP's CyberCop Scanner to assess network vulnerability from the hacker's vantage point—that is, from outside the security perimeter. For example, a $549 one-year/six-scan CyberCop ASaP subscription includes technical support (8:00 AM - 5:00 PM, five days/week), four incident reports per month, and incident response within 8 business hours. According to Kopeck, CyberCop ASaP is an excellent tool to demonstrate whether or not a customer's security policy is really doing the job. "We use this scanner when we visit new accounts," said Kopeck. "This turns out to be pretty enlightening, especially when the security administrator thinks he's done a good job. Often, we can find holes that the customer is certain have already been plugged."

MyCIO.com's Firewall and VPN ASaP services are more complex, because both employ hardware at the customer premises. According to Kopeck, myCIO.com is currently using NetScreen to support most managed firewall/VPN services, available in a one-to-two year subscriptions. "In a small office, we might install a NetScreen-5," said Kopeck. "In a larger enterprise, we might install several NetScreen-100's. In all cases, the managed services we can provide with this platform do not change. We manage the NetScreens from our security operations center, 24x7."

NetScreen firewalls include VPN capability. MyCIO.com administrators use this feature to manage the firewall/VPN service, even if the customer does not subscribe to VPN ASaP. "We ship our firewalls with a preconfigured policy that lets our engineers login to the box remotely from our SOC, over an encrypted VPN tunnel," said Kopeck. "We will use this tunnel to set up our customer's security policy, then run a vulnerability scan. We'll review scan results to see if the customer's policy is implemented correctly and to identify any additional vulnerabilities that the customer might want to address before they "light up" the box. We never have to dispatch someone to the customer's location—this keeps our productivity high and our failure rate low. We can bring a customer up in minutes to hours (once the box arrives), as opposed to days or weeks."

MyCIO.com's website and product literature include a somewhat confusing array of Firewall and VPN ASaP services. Remote Access VPN services use NAI's PGP VPN client software. Branch Office VPN and Firewall ASaP services appear to use NetScreen hardware. But Firewall ASaP with Gateway Filtering services are based on NAI Gauntlet for Solaris. When asked about this apparent overlap, Kopeck explained "When we started myCIO.com, we shipped Gauntlet with these services. But as we moved out to market, we found that we needed something that would scale from the very low end to the high end without a change in operating system. NetScreen allows us to do that. Gauntlet is only appropriate for high-end customers. NetScreen allows us to reach the low end of the SMB/SME marketplace."

Price is based upon average number of users, subscription length, and service level. For example, a one-year/25-user subscription to Remote Access VPN ASaP Bronze Service was quoted at $5,750 ($1,250 startup fee). Connecting two offices with a one-year/10-user subscription to Branch Office VPN Bronze Service will run you $5,800 ($3,040 startup fee). At the high end, a one-year/500-user Firewall ASaP Gold Service with High Availability and VPN Extranet appears to top out at $69,676 ($7,000 startup fee). [All prices obtained from myCIO.com's website quote-on-demand feature.]

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