Every security assessment and vulnerability management engagement starts with the same practical question: how does the audit team actually get eyes and hands on your network? Traditionally, the answer has meant flights, hotel rooms, rental cars, and a consultant's calendar built around travel logistics as much as technical work. Digital Elevation built DEDRA to change that equation.
What is DEDRA?
DEDRA, the Digital Elevation Device for Remote Audit, is a solid-state computing platform about the size of a cigar box that gives our security team secure, remote access to your environment. It ships to your office, your team plugs it into your network, and from that point forward Digital Elevation's security staff can conduct assessment and monitoring work as if we were sitting in your server room, without anyone having to be there in person.
Under the hood, DEDRA connects back to Digital Elevation over a highly secured Virtual Private Network (VPN), so only authorized DE security team members can ever reach the device. Once it's installed, DEDRA is firewalled off from the rest of your internal environment and sits dormant until it's needed for a scheduled audit task. Just as importantly, DEDRA doesn't store or retain any audit data. It's a secure gateway, not a data repository, which keeps sensitive findings and scan results off of hardware sitting on your premises.
Two ways DEDRA fits into an engagement
DEDRA serves two distinct purposes, and which one applies depends on how your engagement is structured:
As a virtual security staff member. For larger or more complex environments, DEDRA can supplement an onsite team rather than replace it. A remote Digital Elevation analyst works through DEDRA alongside your onsite consultant, which means an engagement that might otherwise require two onsite staff members can often be scaled down to one, without cutting scope or coverage.
As the remote audit gateway. For engagements that don't require anyone onsite at all, DEDRA becomes the primary connection point. We ship the device, your team plugs it in, and the entire audit is conducted remotely from that point forward.
The one category of work DEDRA can't cover is anything that requires a human to physically observe your environment: badge access testing, walk-throughs, server room security, and other physical security assessments still call for boots on the ground. For nearly everything else in a technical security assessment, DEDRA gets the job done.
The backbone of our vulnerability management program
While DEDRA is useful for one-off assessments, it's the engine behind Digital Elevation's ongoing Vulnerability Management Program. Once a client installs DEDRA on their network, our security team can run monthly or quarterly cycles of vulnerability scanning, password analysis, cloud security analysis, and other recurring audit tasks. This gives your team a regular, consistent snapshot of your security posture instead of a once-a-year point-in-time check.
That recurring connectivity also opens the door to work that's hard to justify scheduling a full onsite visit for. If your IT team resolves a finding between scheduled scans, we can use DEDRA to run a spot-check or patch verification on demand, confirming that what was supposed to be patched actually was and that the underlying vulnerability is genuinely closed, not just marked resolved in a ticket.
The budget case
An onsite security auditor is often the preferred experience, and DEDRA isn't meant to replace that relationship. What it offers is flexibility: airfare, lodging, a rental car, and meals get replaced with the cost of shipping a small device to your office. For organizations trying to stretch a security budget further, that means Digital Elevation can be brought in for more frequent engagements, or the Vulnerability Management Program can run on a predictable monthly or quarterly cadence, without travel costs eating into the scope of work.
DEDRA isn't a gimmick. It's infrastructure.
It lets us show up for your environment as often as your risk profile actually requires, not just once a year.
The takeaway
DEDRA lets Digital Elevation show up for your environment as often as your risk profile actually requires, whether that's augmenting an onsite team, running a fully remote assessment, or powering an ongoing vulnerability management cadence that keeps you ahead of new exposures between full audits. If your organization has been putting off more frequent security assessments because of travel cost or scheduling friction, DEDRA is designed to remove that barrier.
Interested in learning how DEDRA could support your next assessment or an ongoing Vulnerability Management Program? Reach out to the Digital Elevation team to discuss what a DEDRA-enabled engagement would look like for your environment.
W. Scott Montgomery is Director of Security at Digital Elevation.