What Is a Technology Alignment Review?
A recurring audit of your environment against 350+ standards, feeding the vCIO roadmap.
A technology alignment review is a recurring audit of your IT environment against a written framework of technical and security standards, performed by a Technology Alignment Engineer, that identifies misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, risks and operational gaps before they cause outages or incidents. At Mentis Group that framework contains more than 350 controls aligned to NIST and CIS.
What gets reviewed
- Identity: MFA coverage, admin accounts, stale users, permission sprawl.
- Endpoints: protection status, encryption, patch level, local admin rights.
- Servers and cloud: configuration, patching, backup coverage and verification.
- Network: firewall rules and firmware, segmentation, wireless security, remote access.
- Microsoft 365: security settings, sharing defaults, conditional access, mailbox rules.
- Backup and recovery: retention, immutability, restore tests, recovery objectives.
- Documentation: accuracy of the environment record.
- Lifecycle: hardware and software approaching end of support.
What happens with the findings
Misalignments are reported, prioritized and either remediated by our Centralized Services team as routine work or fed to your vCIO for the roadmap and quarterly business review. Over time the environment converges on the standard and stays there, which is why alignment clients experience fewer outages and fewer security incidents.
How it differs from a one-time assessment
An assessment is a snapshot. Alignment is a discipline: the same standards, checked again on a schedule, with drift caught each cycle. It is the Assess and Optimize steps of the Mentis Process running continuously.
Why the framework matters
The controls map to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and CIS Controls, which are also what cyber insurers and customer security questionnaires ask about. Alignment work produces the evidence those questionnaires require. See what is the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.
Technology alignment reviews are included in Mentis Group's Fully Managed IT and Co-Managed IT programs and described on the Our Process page. Your vCIO uses the results to plan.
For a longer look at this topic, read How Mentis Group Brings Structure and Clarity to Your IT Strategy on the Mentis Group blog.
Have a question about your own environment? Schedule a consultation with Mentis Group or call (866) 901-7808.