Guide
Preparing Your Team for a Scheduled Scan Window
How to brief IT contacts, set blackout hours, and avoid false alarms when assessment traffic hits your firewall and monitoring tools.
Surprise scanning creates noise. Staff see unusual connection attempts, monitoring tools raise tickets, and someone may block the assessor mid-run. A short preparation routine prevents most of that friction.
Name one technical contact who can answer questions during the window. Share their mobile number with the assessment team and confirm they know which assets are in scope. If your MSP holds the keys, include them on the kickoff note.
Agree blackout hours for fragile systems. Payroll runs, end-of-month billing batches, and warehouse scanners often dislike concurrent heavy probing. Shift those hosts to quieter slots or exclude them until a later cycle.
Tell whoever watches the firewall and endpoint alerts that authorised scanning will occur. Provide the source IP ranges used by the assessor. Without that heads-up, a well-meaning block can invalidate half a day of work.
Keep a simple change log. If someone patches a host mid-scan, note the time. That context helps explain why a finding appears intermittent in the draft report.
After the window closes, ask for a quick status: completed hosts, deferred items, and any systems that rejected probes. Early clarity beats discovering gaps only when the final PDF arrives.