Scoping….the process of gathering data to put together a statement of work for a client.

To be 100% honest, I love scoping. And MSI doesn’t scope via form letter, although I’ve seen a variety of companies take this approach.

Is it because I want to talk to you? Well, partially – I do enjoy the vast majority of our clients. But here’s where I think the “fill in the form” plan fails.

First, when you’re not engaged in conversation, you’re viewing the client requirements with an eye towards putting a peg in the hole of one of your offerings. Even if that ends up to be a square peg in a round hole.

Second, the conversation often takes many twists and turns. As we talk about MSI, and our capabilities…it will happen that what a client asks for isn’t precisely what they need. We can offer a different service, and help them get to their end goal in a different way. And this isn’t always more services…it’s equally likely that it will be less, or a custom variation on a service we already have. The majority of clients don’t fall into “canned” services….and it’s refreshing to talk to them when they’re also engaging other vendors simply dropping them into a slot.

So the first question of any scoping conversation is – what is the purpose? What problem are you trying to solve? Is it regulatory – you have to have X assessment? Is something broken? Or are you trying to become aware of some security gaps – whatever they may be.

That’s the springboard of the conversation, helps us get to know you, and helps you to get the right mix of services. It’s personalized, customized, and based on individual attention from our sales and technical staff.

The next piece of serious hands-on attention comes when we’ve gathered the details for the engagement. Does the information provided make sense? If you’re a financial services firm, and you’ve chosen to be measured against HIPAA, is that really the right choice for you? The push-button approach may miss that.

Another item that’s fairly common is typos or inaccurate information in the network space provided. So we’ll do passive recon on the information provided. Does the IP space really belong to your company? Are you using hosting via AWS, which requires an additional penetration test form? Are you using a host like Rackspace that has additional contract stipulations on penetration testing?

Throughout the engagement, there are more personal touches. Via our project management portal, the engineers working on your engagement touch base every day, every other day as work progresses. If a highly critical issue is discovered, all work stops, and the engineers will get on the phone with you. We don’t believe in a situation where a critical vulnerability is only shared in a report, weeks after the discovery.

Now the reports are in your hands. We keep those reports for ~90 days – after that, all reports are purged from the system. During that 90 days, we can supply replacement copies – we can also supply the password used for encryption, if you’ve misplaced it. Sanitized copies of reports can be produced as well, for dissemination to vendors, clients, regulatory bodies, or any interested parties that you need to share this information with – a small fee may apply.

At the end of the day, the question is – who did you help today? It’s rare for MSI to end the day where we can’t answer that question in multiple avenues. It’s one of my favorite things, and we’d love to help you!