FAQs

Absolutely. This is one of the most common situations we work with. Clarent360 begins every security uplift engagement with a structured baseline assessment that identifies your most critical gaps, maps them to your specific risk profile and produces a prioritised remediation roadmap. You will leave that first engagement knowing exactly where to focus, in what order and why — rather than trying to tackle everything at once with no clear direction.

Most organisations assume their Microsoft 365 tenant is reasonably secure because it is a trusted platform. The reality is that default configurations are rarely sufficient, and licensing features that could significantly reduce risk often go unactivated. Clarent360's Microsoft 365 security review examines your tenant configuration, identity settings, sharing controls, admin role hygiene, Defender coverage and Purview policies — and produces a clear report of what is working, what is not and what needs to change. Reach out and we can walk you through what a review involves for your environment.

Zero Trust is a security model built on the principle of never automatically trusting any user, device or connection — even inside your own network. If your organisation has remote workers, cloud platforms, SaaS applications or third-party access to your systems, then yes — Zero Trust is highly relevant to you. Clarent360 designs Zero Trust architectures that are practical and phased, not theoretical frameworks that are impossible to implement. We start where your environment is today and build toward it progressively.

A security incident is often a signal that there are structural gaps in your environment — not just a one-off event. Clarent360 can conduct a post-incident review to understand how the breach occurred, what controls failed or were absent, and what needs to change to prevent recurrence. We then design and implement the specific security controls, policies and monitoring capabilities that address the root causes — not just surface-level fixes. If you have recently experienced an incident, speak to one of our advisors as soon as possible.

Penetration testing is a controlled, authorised simulation of a real attack against your systems — designed to find exploitable vulnerabilities before a malicious actor does. If your organisation handles sensitive data, operates customer-facing applications, is subject to regulatory requirements or has not tested its defences in the past twelve months, you almost certainly need it. Clarent360 provides web application penetration testing and red team engagements tailored to your environment and risk appetite. Contact us to discuss scope and what a test would realistically involve for your organisation.

For many organisations, it is not — and that is not a reflection on the capability of the IT team. Security has become a specialist discipline with its own frameworks, toolsets, threat intelligence and regulatory demands. A general IT team doing their best alongside security is a common and understandable starting point, but it typically leaves material gaps in governance, detection, response and compliance. Clarent360 works alongside internal teams — augmenting capability rather than replacing it — so your organisation gets the specialist depth it needs without rebuilding the team from scratch.

In most cases we can have a consultant scoped and engaged within a short lead time. The first step is a conversation with our team to understand your requirements, timeframe and environment. From there we match the right consultant profile to your needs and move quickly. Reach out to us directly and we will give you an honest timeline based on your specific situation.

ISO 27001 certification is achievable for organisations of all sizes, but it requires structured preparation, documented controls and evidence of an operating Information Security Management System. Clarent360's GRC consultants guide you through the entire journey — from gap assessment against the standard, through policy development and control implementation, to audit readiness and certification support. We have helped organisations at every stage of that process. If certification is on your roadmap, speak to our team early — the earlier you engage, the smoother the path.

The Essential Eight is a prioritised set of mitigation strategies developed by the Australian Cyber Security Centre to protect organisations against the most common cyber threats. While originally developed for Australian government entities, it is now widely adopted across the private sector as a practical baseline for cyber resilience. If your organisation operates in Australia or works with government, adopting the Essential Eight is strongly advisable. Clarent360 can assess your current maturity against the Essential Eight and build a targeted uplift plan to reach your target maturity level.

A risk register that sits in a spreadsheet and gets reviewed once a year is not risk management — it is a compliance artefact. Clarent360 helps organisations build risk management frameworks that are operationally active, integrated into decision-making and owned by the right people across the business. We redesign risk registers, scoring methodologies, treatment workflows and reporting structures so that risk management becomes a genuine business function rather than a documentation exercise.

Managing overlapping compliance obligations — ISO 27001, Essential Eight, SOC 2, PCI DSS, industry regulation — simultaneously is a real challenge, and trying to treat each one separately creates enormous duplication of effort. Clarent360 builds unified compliance frameworks that map controls across multiple standards, so your organisation maintains a single control set that satisfies several obligations at once. This is significantly more efficient and sustainable than running parallel compliance programs. Talk to our GRC team about how this would work for your specific obligations.

Operational Technology (OT) refers to the hardware and software that monitors and controls physical processes — manufacturing equipment, building management systems, utilities infrastructure and similar environments. If your organisation operates any form of OT environment, the security risks are real and often quite different from traditional IT security. Clarent360's OT audit assesses the security of your OT environment against relevant frameworks, identifies risk exposures and produces a practical improvement plan. If you are unsure whether this applies to you, contact us and we will help you work it out.

Board-level cyber risk reporting is one of the areas where many organisations struggle most. Security teams often produce technical reports that boards cannot act on, while boards ask for assurance that the organisation cannot yet provide. Clarent360 designs governance reporting frameworks — risk dashboards, key risk indicators and board briefing templates — that translate technical security posture into business language. The goal is to give your board genuine, evidence-based confidence in your security position rather than a presentation that sounds reassuring but lacks substance.

Cloud migration introduces new security considerations that on-premises models do not have — shared responsibility boundaries, identity-based access control, misconfiguration risk and data residency obligations among them. Clarent360 provides cloud security architecture and review services for Microsoft Azure and AWS that ensure your migration is designed securely from the start. We would rather help you build it right than review it after problems have emerged. Reach out before your migration begins and we will help you design a secure landing zone.

Yes. Clarent360's security advisors and architects work across both platforms. Many organisations operate in a hybrid or multi-cloud model and need security expertise that spans both environments — rather than specialists who only understand one. We review configurations, design security controls and provide advisory services across Azure and AWS, and we understand how the two platforms interact in a multi-cloud context.

Misconfiguration is one of the leading causes of cloud security incidents globally. Overly permissive storage buckets, unrestricted network access, weak identity configurations and unmonitored privileged accounts are among the most frequently exploited weaknesses in cloud environments — and most of them are invisible to organisations until something goes wrong. Clarent360's cloud security reviews specifically look for these issues and produce a clear, prioritised remediation list. If your cloud environment has not been independently reviewed, there is a reasonable chance it has configuration gaps you are not aware of.

Virtualised infrastructure — whether running on VMware, Proxmox, Hyper-V or hyperconverged platforms — introduces specific security considerations around hypervisor hardening, VM isolation, snapshot management and privileged access to the virtualisation layer. A compromise at the virtualisation layer can affect every workload running on top of it. Clarent360 reviews and hardens virtualised environments across both SMB and enterprise platforms, ensuring the foundation your workloads run on is as secure as the workloads themselves.

Many organisations are significantly underutilising their E5 investment. Features like Privileged Identity Management, Insider Risk Management, Defender for Identity, Microsoft Sentinel and the full Purview information protection stack are frequently unactivated or partially deployed. Clarent360 conducts an E5 licence utilisation audit that maps every security feature you are paying for against what is actually running in your environment. The gap between what you have and what you are using is often surprising — and closing it delivers immediate security improvement without any additional licence cost.

Microsoft Purview is Microsoft's information protection and compliance platform — it covers data classification, sensitivity labelling, data loss prevention, insider risk management, communication compliance and eDiscovery. If your organisation handles sensitive data, has regulatory obligations around data privacy, or needs to demonstrate compliance with standards like ISO 27001, then yes — Purview is highly relevant to you. Clarent360 implements Purview in a practical, structured way that reflects your actual data landscape rather than applying generic templates. Talk to our Microsoft Solutions Consultant about where to start.

Microsoft Secure Score is a useful diagnostic tool but it needs to be interpreted carefully. A high score does not automatically mean a secure environment — it means you have completed the actions Microsoft recommends, which may or may not reflect your actual risk priorities. Clarent360 uses Secure Score as one input in a broader assessment, mapping improvement actions to your specific risk profile rather than chasing points mechanically. We produce a risk-mapped improvement roadmap that tells you which Secure Score actions matter most for your environment and why.

Yes, and this is a very common engagement. Having Defender deployed is not the same as having it configured effectively. Coverage gaps, misconfigured policies, missing workloads and untuned detection rules can leave significant blind spots even when Defender appears to be running. Clarent360's Microsoft Solutions Consultant reviews your Defender deployment across endpoint, identity, Office 365 and cloud apps — and produces a clear remediation plan to bring it to an effective operational standard.

This is a data architecture and engineering problem as much as an analytics one. Raw data that is poorly structured, inconsistently governed or siloed across disconnected systems will never produce reliable insight regardless of the visualisation tool you put on top of it. Clarent360 works from the data foundation up — designing pipelines, governance structures and modelling approaches that make your data trustworthy and queryable before building the reporting and analytics layer on top. If your data is not working for you, talk to our analytics team about where the friction actually sits.

Effective executive reporting requires clean data, well-designed metrics and a reporting framework that reflects how leadership actually makes decisions — not just a dashboard full of numbers. Clarent360 designs business intelligence and reporting frameworks that are built around your decision-making needs, connected to reliable data sources and maintainable by your internal team. We focus on reporting that drives action, not reporting that gets opened once and closed.

Yes. Manual data workflows — exports, reconciliations, report generation, data transfers between systems — are a significant source of operational inefficiency and error risk in most organisations. Clarent360 designs and implements data workflow automation that eliminates the manual steps, reduces error rates and frees your team to focus on higher-value work. If you can describe the workflow you want to automate, our engineering team can design a solution for it.

The honest answer is that AI is relevant to most businesses — but not in every way that is currently being marketed. The question is not whether AI could theoretically help you, but whether there is a specific, well-defined business problem where an AI solution would deliver better outcomes than what you do today. Clarent360 approaches AI practically. We start with your actual operational challenges, identify where AI genuinely adds value, and build solutions anchored in those problems. If you are unsure whether AI is right for your organisation, start with a conversation with our team — we will give you an honest assessment rather than a sales pitch.

AI and machine learning are particularly well-suited to security use cases — specifically anomaly detection, behavioural analysis and pattern recognition at a scale and speed that human analysts cannot match. Clarent360 implements AI-driven threat detection capabilities that identify unusual identity behaviour, anomalous data access patterns and suspicious activity signals across your environment. These capabilities complement your human security team rather than replacing them — surfacing the signals that matter so analysts can focus on genuine threats rather than noise.

As AI becomes embedded in business processes, the question of how decisions are made — and by what — becomes genuinely important. Responsible AI governance covers explainability (can you understand why the AI made a decision), auditability (can you prove it), fairness (is it producing biased outcomes) and accountability (who is responsible when it goes wrong). Organisations operating in regulated industries or making decisions that affect customers and employees have real exposure here. Clarent360 builds responsible AI frameworks that give you confidence your AI solutions are defensible, auditable and aligned to your obligations.

Process automation starts with identifying the workflows that are high volume, rule-based and currently dependent on manual effort. Clarent360 works with your operational teams to map those workflows, assess their suitability for automation, and design solutions — whether through AI, workflow tooling or a combination — that reduce manual effort and improve consistency. The starting point is always a clear picture of what you are doing today and where the most valuable opportunities for automation sit.

A recruitment agency finds you a person. Clarent360 provides you with a vetted, experienced practitioner who understands your domain, can contribute from day one and is supported by a team with broader capability behind them. Our consultants are not generalists placed into specialist roles — they are practitioners with demonstrated experience in the specific discipline you need. And because they come through Clarent360, you have a direct relationship with our team if requirements change, scopes need adjusting or additional expertise is needed during the engagement.

Yes — and this is one of the most common reasons organisations engage our consultants. When internal headcount is constrained but delivery cannot wait, bringing in a Clarent360 consultant gives you the resource and expertise you need without adding to permanent headcount. Engagements are flexible and commercially straightforward. Speak to our team about your project timeline, scope and the specific capability you need and we will find the right fit quickly.

Absolutely. Our consultant engagements range from focused short-term deliverables — a security review, an architecture design, a Sentinel deployment — through to longer embedded placements where the consultant becomes part of your team for an extended period. We do not require long minimum commitments for every engagement. Tell us what you need to achieve and how much time you have, and we will structure something that works for your situation.

Before any consultant is placed, we take the time to understand your environment, your team, your technical stack and what success looks like for the engagement. We then match against those requirements — not just on technical skills but on communication style, engagement model preference and relevant prior experience. If the fit is not right for any reason, we address it. Our reputation is built on engagements that deliver, and that starts with getting the right person in front of the right client.

Not if the engagement is run well — and at Clarent360 we build knowledge transfer into every engagement by design. Consultants document their work, produce handover materials, run sessions with your internal team and leave behind runbooks, configuration guides and decision records. The goal is always for your organisation to be more capable at the end of the engagement than at the start — not dependent on us returning to keep things running.

Yes, and we encourage you to reach out before you have it all figured out. Part of what our team does in the initial conversation is help you understand which capability would have the most impact given your current situation, priorities and constraints. Whether you need a Security Advisor to set the direction, an Architect to design the solution, a Microsoft consultant to close E5 gaps or a GRC consultant to get your compliance house in order — we will help you identify the right starting point rather than leaving you to guess.