Computacenter - Palo Alto Cortex Xpanse
Cortex Xpanse is an Active Attack Surface Management (ASM) solution that helps your organization actively discover, analyse and respond to unknown risks in all connected systems and exposed services.
Cortex Xpanse provides complete, current, and accurate visibility into your public-facing infrastructure without any manual intervention from your security teams.
Features
- Monitor/enforce corporate policies and compliance
- Detect/Manage/Mitigate risk from unknown shadow IT operations
- Detect/Manage/Mitigate risk from supply chain vulnerabilities
- Continuous Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning driven security monitoring
- Provision of daily CFAA-compliant vulnerability scanning of known assets
- Full 'cradle to grave' Discovery-Analysis-Remediation via integrated automation
- Ongoing security rule additions/updates via Palo Alto Networks
- No requirement for Hardware/Software/Agents or Firewall Rule Changes
- Highly extensible solution with deep integration capabilities
- Detailed metrics inclusive of pre-built widget driven dashboards
Benefits
- Reduce the risk of Malware & Ransomware infection
- Eliminate unknown Shadow IT / Cloud operations
- Significantly improve on Zero-Day response times
- Expand due-diligence processes for Merger & Acquisition (M&A) assessments
- Detect & eliminate supply chain vulnerabilities
- Gain full visibility of all public facing Internet operations
- Reduce Cyber Insurance premiums
- Implementation and compliance with NCSC cyber security guidanc
Pricing
£81.97 a unit
Service documents
Request an accessible format
Framework
G-Cloud 14
Service ID
8 2 8 4 0 2 9 7 1 0 7 4 9 4 7
Contact
Computacenter (UK) Ltd
Karen Baldock
Telephone: +44 (0) 1707 631000
Email: government@computacenter.com
Service scope
- Software add-on or extension
- Yes, but can also be used as a standalone service
- What software services is the service an extension to
-
1. Attack Surface Management
2. Asset Management
3. Vulnerability Management
4. Supply Chain Management
5. Cyber risk management
7. Vulnerability testing
8. Shadow IT monitoring
9. Cortex XSIAM - Cloud deployment model
- Public cloud
- Service constraints
- Cortex Xpanse is an E-ASM platform that operates outside of the corporate network and sees only what an attacker sees. Cortex Xpanse is therefore only currently applicable to public facing attack surfaces and should not be considered as an internal vulnerability management tool.
- System requirements
- SaaS based and requires no agent software or internal infrastructure
User support
- Email or online ticketing support
- Email or online ticketing
- Support response times
-
24x7x365 Support
Priority 1 (Critical) - < 1 Hour
Priority 2 (High) - 2 Hours
Priority 3 (Medium) - 4 Hours
Priority 4 (Low) - 8 Business Hours
Support Service Level Agreements (SLA) are identical for Monday to Friday and Weekends/Public Holidays. - User can manage status and priority of support tickets
- Yes
- Online ticketing support accessibility
- None or don’t know
- Phone support
- Yes
- Phone support availability
- 24 hours, 7 days a week
- Web chat support
- No
- Onsite support
- Yes, at extra cost
- Support levels
-
All Cortex products from Palo Alto Networks come with a standard support offering included which entitles the customer to 24x7x365 email and telephone support.
Other 'enhanced support' options exist inclusive of premium customer success support and provision of dedicated engineers for short or long term engagements - all such options can be negotiated and applied as required - Support available to third parties
- Yes
Onboarding and offboarding
- Getting started
- Online training and user documentation is provided as standard. In addition, through remote or face to face sessions hands on workshops can be arranged to further familiarise each individual customer as required.
- Service documentation
- Yes
- Documentation formats
-
- HTML
- End-of-contract data extraction
- Customers have full access to data through the Expander API. All data may be retrieved and stored in another system prior to contract end date.
- End-of-contract process
- At the end of the contract, the customer data is not accessible to the customer.
Using the service
- Web browser interface
- Yes
- Supported browsers
-
- Microsoft Edge
- Firefox
- Chrome
- Application to install
- No
- Designed for use on mobile devices
- No
- Service interface
- Yes
- User support accessibility
- None or don’t know
- Description of service interface
- The admin interface provides users the ability to set up integrations with cloud providers and Prisma Cloud, as well as control over active policies.
- Accessibility standards
- None or don’t know
- Description of accessibility
- Expander is accessible through the web UI and through its extensive API.
- Accessibility testing
- N/A
- API
- Yes
- What users can and can't do using the API
- There is full parity between the UI and the API
- API documentation
- Yes
- API documentation formats
-
- Open API (also known as Swagger)
- HTML
- API sandbox or test environment
- No
- Customisation available
- Yes
- Description of customisation
- Admin users can adjust available policies based on customer risk tolerance. Can also set up integrations with AWS and Prisma Cloud to ingest known cloud assets.
Scaling
- Independence of resources
- The service is provided in a SaaS model, and resources to discover, analyse, store and access the data collected are provided by the underlying cloud platform used to deliver the service. The system is architected for redundancy of capacity and dynamically scales based on the load required.
Analytics
- Service usage metrics
- Yes
- Metrics types
-
The number of assets discovered
Trend lines for assets discovered - Reporting types
-
- API access
- Real-time dashboards
- Regular reports
- Reports on request
Resellers
- Supplier type
- Reseller providing extra support
- Organisation whose services are being resold
- Palo Alto
Staff security
- Staff security clearance
- Other security clearance
- Government security clearance
- Up to Developed Vetting (DV)
Asset protection
- Knowledge of data storage and processing locations
- Yes
- Data storage and processing locations
- Other locations
- User control over data storage and processing locations
- No
- Datacentre security standards
- Complies with a recognised standard (for example CSA CCM version 3.0)
- Penetration testing frequency
- At least every 6 months
- Penetration testing approach
- Another external penetration testing organisation
- Protecting data at rest
-
- Physical access control, complying with SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
- Physical access control, complying with another standard
- Encryption of all physical media
- Scale, obfuscating techniques, or data storage sharding
- Other
- Other data at rest protection approach
- Data is encrypted at rest using 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256)
- Data sanitisation process
- Yes
- Data sanitisation type
-
- Explicit overwriting of storage before reallocation
- Deleted data can’t be directly accessed
- Equipment disposal approach
- In-house destruction process
Data importing and exporting
- Data export approach
- Data may be exported using the Expander API, generated reports, or CSV download.
- Data export formats
-
- CSV
- ODF
- Other
- Other data export formats
- Some PDF reports
- Data import formats
- CSV
Data-in-transit protection
- Data protection between buyer and supplier networks
- TLS (version 1.2 or above)
- Data protection within supplier network
- TLS (version 1.2 or above)
Availability and resilience
- Guaranteed availability
-
Cortex Xpanse Services shall be
available 99.9% of the time, measured monthly, excluding scheduled maintenance. Further, any downtime resulting from outages of third-party connections or utilities or other reasons beyond the control of Palo Alto Networks will be excluded.
Customers are credited 2% of monthly service fees (downtime credit) for each breach. A breach is defined as a period of 60 consecutive minutes of downtime. - Approach to resilience
- The service is designed around a major cloud provider's infrastructure using their services to provide resilience
- Outage reporting
- Service status is reported at https://expanse.statuspage.io/
Identity and authentication
- User authentication needed
- Yes
- User authentication
-
- 2-factor authentication
- Username or password
- Access restrictions in management interfaces and support channels
- RBAC are applied across management interfaces and service/support channels
- Access restriction testing frequency
- At least every 6 months
- Management access authentication
-
- 2-factor authentication
- Username or password
Audit information for users
- Access to user activity audit information
- No audit information available
- Access to supplier activity audit information
- No audit information available
- How long system logs are stored for
- At least 12 months
Standards and certifications
- ISO/IEC 27001 certification
- Yes
- Who accredited the ISO/IEC 27001
- BSI
- ISO/IEC 27001 accreditation date
- 28/04/2022
- What the ISO/IEC 27001 doesn’t cover
- Our ISO/IEC 27001 certification relates to the information security management system and not the products or services of the certified organisation.
- ISO 28000:2007 certification
- No
- CSA STAR certification
- No
- PCI certification
- Yes
- Who accredited the PCI DSS certification
- Gemserv Ltd
- PCI DSS accreditation date
- 22/09/2021
- What the PCI DSS doesn’t cover
- As per section 2a of the PCI-DSS certificate, there are no areas that were marked as ‘Not Included’. We therefore confirm we are compliant across all relevant requirements for our services as a Hosting Provider, Managed Services and Payment Processing.
- Cyber essentials
- Yes
- Cyber essentials plus
- Yes
- Other security certifications
- No
Security governance
- Named board-level person responsible for service security
- Yes
- Security governance certified
- Yes
- Security governance standards
-
- ISO/IEC 27001
- Other
- Other security governance standards
- SOC2 Type 2
- Information security policies and processes
- The Information Protection Process & Procedures Policy establishes controls to ensure that the security policies (that address purpose, scope, roles, responsibilities, management commitment, and coordination among organizational entities), processes, and procedures are maintained and used to manage protection of information systems and assets, including a system development lifecycle to manage systems.
Operational security
- Configuration and change management standard
- Supplier-defined controls
- Configuration and change management approach
- All application and infrastructure changes require separation of duties, testing, peer review, and approval, before implementation.
- Vulnerability management type
- Undisclosed
- Vulnerability management approach
-
Critical/Emergency patch must be applied and validated within 72 hrs. when a patch is available, otherwise compensating controls must be invoked.
A security patch that addresses a vulnerability which is rated as high risk must be applied and validated within 30 days.
Vulnerability scans are performed at least weekly. - Protective monitoring type
- Undisclosed
- Protective monitoring approach
- Palo Alto Networks SOC team monitors all environments for potential compromises 24x7. Security event and incident management processes are in place including a formal Information Security Incident Response Plan. Security, availability, and confidentiality related security events are assigned to Information Security for evaluation and resolution.
- Incident management type
- Undisclosed
- Incident management approach
- Palo Alto Networks has a incident management program that has been approved by management and communicated to all relevant parties. The incident management program is owned and reviewed by our Information Security department. Reporting procedures are defined in the SLA.
Secure development
- Approach to secure software development best practice
- Independent review of processes (for example CESG CPA Build Standard, ISO/IEC 27034, ISO/IEC 27001 or CSA CCM v3.0)
Public sector networks
- Connection to public sector networks
- No
Social Value
- Social Value
-
Social Value
- Fighting climate change
- Covid-19 recovery
- Tackling economic inequality
- Equal opportunity
- Wellbeing
Fighting climate change
Computacenter ensures that our business practices deliver effective stewardship of the environment in line with the Social Value Model. Computacenter's science-based emissions reductions targets are approved with the SBTi. Our Net Zero Journey Group Emissions is now just 16% of 2015 levels as outlined in our carbon reduction plan to achieve ‘Net Zero’ carbon emissions by 2040.
Business travel is necessary, both for our customer requirements and for our staff. We have materially reduced business travel, ensuring all business trips are necessary, helping reduce carbon emissions. We are investing in technology to allow greater use of existing communication platforms as part of our ‘hybrid working’ strategy. One of the key benefits we believe this will help us realise is reducing emissions from business travel by 35 per cent by 2025 (compared to 2019). For G-Cloud services this means that we will drive the use of virtual, technology-enabled meetings as much as possible for all internal and external sessions, including those with our wider supply chain.
Further to this we can provide customer advisory services which include guidance and recommendations on how to improve their sustainability performance to help inform customer decision making whilst achieving the desired commercial and technical outcomes through the services being provided.
Computacenter has introduced incentives to encourage the replacement of the existing Fleet with Ultra Low Emission Vehicles. We have 44 electric charging points across 2 of our locations to encourage the adoption of electric and hybrid vehicles, either through our company car scheme or privately. For this framework specifically, this means that our consultants, project managers and engineering resource will have access to a ULEV vehicle via our company car scheme and the ability to charge a vehicle at Computacenter office locations.Covid-19 recovery
Throughout the pandemic we have closely followed and implemented government guidance relating to the workplace and COVID-19. We created a COVID-19 risk assessment to enable us to understand the improvements that need to be made to our workplace conditions in line with the Government COVID-19 secure workplace guidelines and the business advice that is now current. It looks at the risks of COVID-19 in the workplace, such as hygiene, & cleaning and then states what we must put in place to mitigate these risks.
As we enter the recovery phase of the pandemic, we have introduced hybrid working for our employees. This will allow most employees including those delivering G-Cloud services increased flexibility in how and where they work ensuring that we still deliver the best service to our customers whilst looking after our people.
Our COVID-19 steering committee is there to identify activities that will improve workplace conditions then plan, build and regularly monitor various programmes focused on supporting the COVID-19 recovery effort. At these meetings, chaired by our Chief People Officer (‘CPO’) Sarah Long, our CIO John Gibbs and Services operations, the steering committee discuss changes that need to be implemented, identify areas of improvement, and review our roadmap of new activities.
Throughout the life of the contract, we will use our existing activities (as well as those that are in development in due course) to continue to improve workplace conditions in support of the COVID-19 recovery effort.
Questions relating to travel were included in the COVID-19 surveys that were issued through the pandemic. The assessment highlighted concerns people had about public transport. To help all employees; managers were coached and given guidance about being flexible with start/finish times. We continue to adapt our approach based on feedback received through the steering committee and employee surveys.Tackling economic inequality
As a diverse and inclusive organisation with a strong focus on equality and driving in-work progression, our approach to recruitment and employment is aligned to recognised industry best practices such as the 5 principles of quality work as set out in the Good Work Plan.
Our Employee Impact Groups for disadvantaged or minority groups provide representation, support, and community engagement, feeding into our People Panel ensuring all voices are heard, underpinning our wider ambition of building a sustainable business for the long term.
We put specific measures in place to provide opportunities to under-represented groups or those who face barriers to employment, including comprehensive outreach programmes for schools and universities, as well as partnerships with non-profit organisations within our communities. We continue focus on reaching harder to reach groups and people who are underrepresented in our sector by working with charities and schools in the local community to offer career talks and work experience opportunities. Our school outreach programme has over 130 volunteers dedicating over 2,600 hours running activities for employability and life skills in schools, colleges, and universities.
Computacenter is one of the 9 founding members of ‘Technology Community for Racial Equality’ (‘TC4RE’), a group set up to drive racial equality throughout the technology industry, with which we are delivering a half-day virtual event on ‘Enabling Ethnic Diversity’ featuring a series of expert keynotes, live panel discussions and interactive workshops with representation from across the UK technology community.
Furthermore, Computacenter are a silver level partner in the Armed Forces Covenant and has introduced a programme that provides the opportunity to attain a degree and ServiceNow certification whilst receiving full salary for armed forces leavers. This programme is the first of many programmes we intend on running to help ex-forces personal transition back into the workplace and the IT industry.Equal opportunity
Computacenter is committed to providing equal opportunities to all through fair recruitment practices and employment conditions across our organisation.
We are a Disability Confident ‘Committed’ employer, committed to making lasting changes to our business creating a diverse talent pool. We work with partners through our community outreach, who are specialists in disability. An example is our work with Knightsfield School in Welwyn Garden City, a specialist school for deaf children. We run at least 3 ‘get work ready’ events with them, as well as offer up to 4 work experience opportunities and onsite visits every year.
For this contract, we will use existing initiatives (as well as others that are in development) to provide career opportunities for individuals from under-represented groups to address requirements for specific skills or roles with a focus on increasing skillsets through the life of the contract. This will include apprenticeships aligned to security and cloud/infrastructure departments, as well as industrial placements and graduate schemes for our ServiceNow Centre of Excellence, with specific focus on delivering cloud-based services to our customers.
Our workforce for services delivered under this framework will have access to existing initiatives aimed at supporting in-work progression and development for those from disadvantaged/minority groups. For example, our gender diversity initiatives include our Growing Together programme, which over 150 women have been through so far, of which over one-third have been promoted or taken a new role within a year following the mentoring and coaching provided.
We are also committed to driving racial equality across our business and the wider technology industry. We are a founding member of ‘Technology Community for Racial Equality’ which recently delivered a half-day virtual event on ‘Enabling Ethnic Diversity’ featuring a series of expert keynotes, live panel discussions and interactive workshops with representation from across the UK technology community.Wellbeing
We understand how important employee Wellbeing is for a sustainable business model, therefore we are committed to creating a sustainable supply chain. Ensuring the wellbeing of our employees are looked after will positively affect productivity, recruitment, and retention rates.
In November 2021, a designated UK wellbeing manager was appointed and has since launched our wellbeing strategy, which aligns with the Social Value Model and the 6 standards of the Mental Health at Work Commitment, signed in July 2021. We are actively implementing the enhanced mental health standards as recommended through the ‘Thriving at Work’ review, and NICE mental health at work guidelines, as part of our Wellbeing strategy. The strategy encompasses four pillars of wellbeing, mental, physical, financial, and social. We are a Menopause friendly organisation and have created a support network for those in need.
We have 109 Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) accredited staff in the UK, trained by Mind, who act as Wellbeing Champions providing mental health first aid support and promoting our wellbeing services which those delivering G-Cloud service provisions will have access to. These champions are from every business area and from different seniority. We hold events throughout the year organised by our UK wellbeing manager and Champions, which have included celebrating World Mental Health days, Menopause awareness, financial wellbeing webinars and sponsored events to raise money for our mental health charity partners.
2021 also saw the launch of our new groupwide app-based programme ‘Be Well’ which gives our people access to over 3,000 fitness, nutrition, health and wellbeing courses through Humanoo. Through this app we have launched an extremely popular groupwide step challenge and has encouraged our people to be more active, with over 35% of our workforce now using the app and covering over 1.8bn steps so far.
Pricing
- Price
- £81.97 a unit
- Discount for educational organisations
- No
- Free trial available
- No