CyberSheath Managed Services for Small & Mid-Size Business

Cybersecurity at small and mid-sized businesses are often under-resourced with an “Army of One” approach to compliance and risk management. Compliance with regulatory requirements like DFARs 252.204-7012, HIPAA, PCI DSS, NERC CIP, Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) and more compete with actual cyber defense efforts to monitor, detect and respond to threats. Doing what you have always done, buying more products and surviving audits, isn’t effective and doesn’t scale. There is a better way and its effectiveness can be measured with contractual Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) that enable cybersecurity to be a force multiplier for your business.

Instead of hiring FTE’s and deploying one-off, point solution products that don’t integrate with existing investments, consider Managed Security Services that deliver:

Cloud-based security monitoring platform in one unified solution
Integrated security information and event management (SIEM) and log management
Asset discovery
Vulnerability assessment
Intrusion detection
Behavioral monitoring
Threat intelligence
Privileged account management
Automated and simplified regulatory compliance management

Just think about your infrastructure today. How many tools and products do you have spread across too few engineers without enough time to deploy, monitor and manage them? Do you feel like a SIEM solution is a luxury that a business your size can’t afford? Small and mid-sized businesses often have to make tough choices between resource allocation, and a SIEM solution rarely makes the cut because of cost and complexity. The irony is that a SIEM solution is a foundational investment that improves your ability to allocate resources, meet compliance requirements and defend your infrastructure. Coupled with Managed Security Services, the return on investment (ROI) for your business is measurable in a variety of ways.

Our partner, AlienVault, commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study that detailed the potential ROI organizations can realize by deploying the AlienVault Unified Security Management ® (USM) platform. The results aligned with our experience delivering managed services in the defense, financial, healthcare, technology and manufacturing industries. Here is what Forrester Consulting found:

Simplified compliance reporting for companies, resulting in nearly 6,000 hours of time-savings each year. Prior to adopting AlienVault USM Anywhere, key pieces of information had to be pulled from many different systems and consolidated into reports for the auditor. This process took nearly four months, but with AlienVault, onsite audits could be completed in one week as the compliance information and reports were readily available in real-time. This resulted in approximately 2,000 hours of time savings per audit and, on average, three audits were being held each year.

AlienVault USM Anywhere reduces the cost of incidents by improving threat detection and incident response time by 80%. Based on a 2017 study conducted by the Ponemon Institute, the probability that an organization will experience a breach greater than 1,000 records is 14%. However, with the deployment of USM Anywhere, the time to detect incidents was dramatically reduced, helping organizations identify and respond to attacks much faster. With 80% faster detection and response time, the impact and probability of a breach could be reduced.

An 80% security operations staff productivity improvement. Prior to adopting AlienVault solutions, organizations didn’t dedicate much time to daily monitoring tasks. On average, two to three investigations arose each week, which took the combined effort of two dedicated resources. After the deployment of AlienVault’s USM Anywhere platform, the security operations team was able to monitor and detect issues in real-time. This reduced the manual effort involved in investigative activities by 80% and allowed the resources to focus their time on more value-added tasks. “We are still responsible for monitoring alerts and logging, but it’s gone from hours per day to minutes. It allows us to focus on things like serving our customers, writing new code, and ultimately bringing more business in the door.”

Threat intelligence saves time and money. With AlienVault Labs threat intelligence, organizations no longer have to dedicate resources to sifting through multiple sources of information and bulletins to keep up with the latest intelligence. Now they can rely on the AlienVault Labs Security Research Team for continuous updates to threat correlation rules and directives. With the added benefit of not having to pay for an alternative threat intelligence subscription, the overall annual cost savings for the composite organization resulted in more than $40,000 per year.

The data from the study was clear, managed services save time and money by enabling more effective regulatory compliance and risk management. You’re probably already intuitively know that managed security services will be a game-changer for your organization and the data from the study only further strengthened your opinion. That said there are often at least two challenges to moving forward that businesses struggle with:

Senior management doesn’t want to spend the money, I don’t care what your fancy study says.
Managed Security Services Providers are like gas stations, there’s one on every corner and they all sell the same thing.

Getting past these barriers to realizing the benefits of managed services requires the same solution, selecting a Managed Security Services Provider that can push past them before you have spent any money. You will know when you have selected the right partner when they invest the time upfront to specifically show you how their services benefit your business. Candidly, management is right. Nobody cares what a vendor study says might happen at your business based on possibility. Your potential MSSP should be spending time documenting and demonstrating how their services will reduce risk and simplify compliance at your business. You will quickly be able to differentiate MSSP’s offering canned reporting and push-button threat detection from those with teams that span CISO through operations analyst level experience. You are buying a service and that service should have real people that can document and articulate the MSSP value specific to your business before you spend any money. Regardless of whether that takes two weeks or six months, you will know you have the right MSSP when they invest the time pre-sales to detail the value to your business.

Managed security services are the answer to your small and mid-sized business cybersecurity needs and selecting the right partner will be a force multiplier for your business.