Ideal Innovations Reinforces its IT Security Posture

Ideal Innovations, Inc., (I-3) is a consulting firm that specializes in scientific, engineering, and security technologies designed to protect lives, enhance survivability, and enable more efficient operations. Since its founding in 1998, I-3 has grown from two employees to more than 300, with personnel also located in West Virginia, Texas, and overseas in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Along with that growth in size and scope, I-3’s dependence on business-technology systems has grown. And the reality is that small and mid-sized businesses today, such as I-3, are faced with daunting security pressures.That’s the challenge John deGruyter, senior network security engineer at I-3, had to meet. As I-3’s business grew, so did it’s need to better manage the vulnerabilities on its IT infrastructure. For its vulnerability management efforts, I-3 had been relying on a set of various commercial and open source tools to keep its systems secure.  To improve efficiency, I-3 elected to try QualysGuard Vulnerability Management (VM), from Qualys Inc.

"While we were testing QualysGuard, a serious client-side vulnerability had just come out. The day after the vulnerability was announced, QualysGuard VM was able to detect it," explains deGruyter. "QualysGuard’s expedient response time was significant for us as we looked for ways to better protect our end users," he says.

"Another of the strengths of QualysGuard that immediately stuck out was the ability to securely run scans on our other locations. Our previous scanner required much more maintenance and required us to log in to multiple locations," he adds. "It would sometimes take 10 minutes for the vulnerability scanner to download the latest updates and be ready to scan.  QualysGuard is fast. Just logon, select what you want to scan, and go," says deGruyter.

Click here to read more about how I-3 ensures that its systems are hardened in the most cost-effective and quickest way possible.