Pinnacle People Penetration Testing.

"Aristi's flexible and professional approach meant that we could deliver the project in a very challenging timeframe and with stringent requirements to fulfil. Their approach and report was commended by our client and the responsiveness to meet our timeframe and re-schedule the plan was greatly appreciated." Matt Brook Head of Corporate Infrastructure

Pinnacle People is an employment and skills business, tackling worklessness and promoting social mobility. Set up in 2008, they have quickly established themselves as a supplier to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and Local Authorities and became a prime contractor to DWP in October 2009. Pinnacle People provide services to over 75,000 people each year, focusing on supporting people into long term, sustainable employment.

Pinnacle People are a subsidiary business of Pinnacle Regeneration Group; providing housing and urban regeneration services to local authorities and the wider public sector.

Pinnacle People deployed the Appian Enterprise business process management suite to store and manage the data received from DWP; to support contract delivery across multiple UK re-gions and to pass personal, sensitive data up and down their supply chain. They need to main-tain an Information Security Management System aligned to ISO27001 and the DWP’s own stringent requirements.

Pinnacle People required assurance that all information systems and associated assets of the Appian platform were protected from penetration and compromise from intruders before the sys-tem went live. The scope also included physical security and social engineering tests to be con-ducted on the service provider’s data centre and the Pinnacle People Contact Centre. Time-scales were tight and the service had to go live on time in order to meet contractual obligations.

Aristi was selected as the trusted security partner and worked with Pinnacle People to develop a project plan for the proposed activities. Internal and external penetration tests were conducted to CESG CHECK standards on the Appian infrastructure and also on a Virtual Desktop environ-ment used to access a secure DWP IT system. The testing also included a review of the server builds and firewall rule bases. During the testing, Pinnacle People were kept informed of any issues found allowing fixes to be implemented and re-tested quickly. Aristi conducted social en-gineering attacks and physical security assessments on the data centre and contact centre iden-tifying a number of issues which were quickly addressed by Pinnacle People. Results of all the testing activity were documented in a detailed report.

Aristi’s flexible approach allowed for moving milestones within the project to be catered for and all deadlines to be met. Working closely with the client, Aristi provided the required assurance allowing the service to go live on time.