Introduction

Skans turns an isolated network — the kind of islanded camera, IoT, OT, or building-automation enclave that can’t touch the cloud or a corporate directory — into a fully governed environment, without a security team and without ever phoning home.

It’s a single appliance that becomes the enclave’s root of trust: it stands up the directory and certificate authority the network never had, gives every device its own identity, and then layers on access control, patching, hardening, backup, monitoring, and audit-ready compliance evidence. Everything runs on the local network itself — the guiding principle is everything inside, nothing out.

Who runs it #

Skans is designed to be set up by the technician who installs the equipment — the person hanging cameras and pulling cable — not a network engineer or a PKI expert. Setup is two or three plain questions and one button. You see outcomes (“✓ cameras encrypted · 2 certs expiring”), never the directory, CA, or RADIUS internals underneath.

That said, there’s real depth for the admins who want it. Getting Started and How-tos are written for the operator; Concepts and Reference go deeper for anyone who wants the architecture, PKI, and control mappings.

What you get #

• Device identity for everything. Cameras, controllers, sensors, and Windows endpoints each get their own certificate from a built-in certificate authority — pushed even to devices that can’t enroll themselves. No shared passwords.
• Access control on the wire. 802.1X (EAP-TLS) admission keeps unknown devices off the network.
• Monitoring & correlation. Findings are correlated and deduplicated per device — a bounded, meaningful list, never a raw firehose of events.
• Patching without the cloud. A lightweight agent schedules updates locally so isolated Windows machines stay current.
• Compliance evidence. A one-command NIST/CMMC evidence pack, generated from live state.

Where to go next #

• How Skans works → — the mental model (start here)
• Requirements → — what a site needs
• Installation → — bring an appliance online
• Quickstart → — a secured site in about 15 minutes