Box Office Customer Portal

While our customers’ organisational structures may be centralised, distributed or individualised (and any combination of the three), Network Box has always been concerned with the global view. Our support offices and Network Operations Centres are geographically distributed around the world; but all provide feedback to a centralised system known as Outbreak.

The Network Box Outbreak system currently handles approximately 60,000 security events a minute (about 1,000 each second - more than 86 million a day). A large computer system
(nicknamed the WOPR) summarises and correlates all those events in real-time; identifying trends and alerting our security engineers to changes in the global threat landscape.

The Outbreak system is just one of our internal systems that we rely on day-to-day to keep our customers secure. Other internal systems include:

• Global Monitoring System (NBGMS) - a global network of monitoring stations testing, recording and alerting on hundreds of health metrics for each Network Box and Internet gateway.
• Inventory - the system which records which customers own which boxes, resold through which channel partner.
• Licensing - recording the contractual, licensing and SLA arrangements between Network Box, our partners, and customers.
• Deployment - tracking the deployment of new Network Box installations.
• Ticketing - tracking customer and NOC initiated issues and ensuring we meet our SLA targets.
• Workload Statistics - a part of the Outbreak system, this tracks theworkload that Network Box devices are handling (to ensure availability and be pro-active in ensuring sufficient capacity for traffic peaks).

It doesn’t matter if the customer is a global multi-national with offices (and Network Box protection) in a dozen countries, or a small business protected by a single Network Box; our customers are telling us that they want to know the current and historical status of their
protection - in real time. The Network Box Office Customer Portal addresses this requirement by extending the Box Office system to include health, workload, licensing andother such information.

Key Functionality

The Network Box Office Customer Portal provides the following key functionality:

• An overview page showing a map of boxes, VPN and management links against a geographic background. This provides a single overview of the managed network.
• A ticketing module showing customer/NOC initiated tickets and their status.
• A deployment module for tracking the information requirements stage of deployments (including gathering the necessary information for deployment, using online collaborative tools).
• An inventory module showing box ownership and status. This module also includes:
  • A health module; interfaced to the Network Box Global Monitoring System (NBGMS), to show box, gateway and VPN link health status.
  • A licensing module; showing the SLA agreements and contractual arrangements.
  • A workload statistics module; showing box workload and trend analysis.
• A user management module; permitting designated customer administrators to view and maintain Box Office user accounts themselves (without requiring NOC involvement). This module permits the customer greater control of management of the team supporting global deployments.

The system provides a single, simple, powerful web-based user interface for the management of one or more Network Boxes - at the country, regional and global levels.