You cannot secure, budget for or fix what you have not measured. A network health and security assessment establishes what is actually running in your environment, whether the protections you believe are in place are working, and which gaps carry real risk. North Star performs assessments for organizations across the Denver metro area, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins — and it is how nearly every client relationship here begins.
The findings come back in plain language, ranked by risk, with a remediation roadmap you can budget against. You are free to act on it with us, with your existing provider, or internally.
Most security spending is wasted because it is aimed at the wrong layer. A business buys an expensive tool while an administrator account sits without multi-factor authentication, or renews a backup product that has never been restore-tested. An assessment reorders the spending around what would actually cause damage.
It also settles disagreements. When leadership, an internal technologist and an outside provider each have a different view of how exposed the business is, a measured inventory replaces opinion with evidence.
Every device on the network: servers, workstations, laptops, firewalls, switches, printers, cameras, access control, and the connected equipment nobody remembers installing. We produce a network diagram and an asset catalogue with configuration detail, which for most organizations is the first complete list they have ever had.
Who has access to what, and whether they should. We look for administrator accounts without multi-factor authentication, accounts belonging to departed employees, shared logins, service accounts with excessive rights, stale passwords, and permissions that accumulated through role changes rather than being reset.
What your business looks like from the outside. We scan your public IP ranges for open ports, exposed services, unpatched internet-facing systems and misconfigurations, and report each finding with its severity and what an attacker could do with it.
Operating system and application patch levels, unsupported software still in production, endpoint protection coverage and whether it is actually reporting, plus devices that have quietly dropped off management entirely.
Your cloud tenant is where most attacks now land. We review mailbox permissions and delegated access, forwarding rules that may have been set by an intruder, conditional access and multi-factor coverage, sharing and guest-access settings, and whether SPF, DKIM and DMARC are configured so nobody can send mail as your domain.
Where sensitive data actually lives — which is rarely only where people think — who can reach it, what is backed up, whether backups are immutable and offsite, and critically whether a restore has ever been tested. An untested backup is the single most common false assumption we find.
A wireless survey covering encryption strength and rogue access points, plus whether guest Wi-Fi, operational technology, cameras and building systems are genuinely isolated from the network carrying your business data.
Whether written policies, an incident response plan, an offboarding process and current network documentation exist — the things auditors and cyber insurers ask for, and that most organizations discover are missing at the worst possible moment.
Where an assessment is repeated, we also provide a comparison against the previous one, so you can demonstrate improvement to leadership, auditors or an insurer.
Many organizations need an assessment because someone is asking for one. We scope the work to whatever is driving it:
Where an ongoing documented program is needed rather than a point-in-time report, that is delivered through our vCISO and compliance-as-a-service.
Findings vary, but a handful appear in almost every assessment we run:
The report is yours regardless of what you do next. If you want the findings addressed, the work runs through our managed security services and managed IT services, built on the layered approach described on our cyber security page. Common next steps include identity hardening and Zero Trust access, managed detection and response, immutable cloud backup with tested restores, and retiring aging on-premises servers through a Microsoft 365 cloud migration.
North Star performs network health and security assessments for organizations across Colorado’s Front Range, including Denver, Aurora, Lakewood, Arvada, Westminster, Thornton, Northglenn, Broomfield, Commerce City, Brighton, Centennial, Greenwood Village, Englewood, Littleton, Highlands Ranch, Parker, Castle Rock, Golden, Wheat Ridge, Colorado Springs, Monument, Fountain, Fort Collins, Loveland, Windsor and Greeley, along with the surrounding communities.
A structured review of your technology environment that inventories every connected device, examines accounts and permissions, scans your internet-facing systems for vulnerabilities, checks patch and endpoint status, reviews cloud and email configuration, and verifies backup and recovery. It produces a prioritized findings report and a remediation roadmap rather than just raw scan output.
No. Data collection runs during normal operations, requires no permanent software installation, and is designed to be invisible to users. Most organizations notice nothing while it is running.
For a typical small or mid-sized environment, data collection takes a few days, with analysis and the findings presentation following shortly after. Larger or multi-site environments, and assessments scoped to a specific compliance framework, take longer. We give you a timeline at scoping.
No, and the distinction matters. An assessment maps your environment and identifies weaknesses across the whole estate — breadth. A penetration test attempts to actively exploit specific weaknesses to prove what an attacker could achieve — depth. Assessment comes first for almost every organization, because there is little value in paying someone to exploit a gap you already know about.
No. The report is yours to act on however you choose, including with your current provider or internally. We do assessments for organizations that are evaluating providers, meeting a compliance or insurance requirement, or simply want an independent second opinion.
Annually for most organizations, and more often in regulated fields or after significant change — an office move, a cloud migration, an acquisition or notable growth in headcount. Environments drift constantly, so a report more than a year old describes a network that no longer exists.
Nearly every assessment we run surfaces something the organization did not know was there — an account, a device, or a control that stopped working without anyone noticing. Better to find it deliberately than during an incident.
Call 303-552-0018 or book a time above to scope an assessment for your Denver, Colorado Springs or Fort Collins organization.