Guest blog courtesy of LimaCharlie.To stay competitive, MSSPs must improve incident response (IR) times and provide attractive service-level agreements (SLAs). However, technical and cost barriers have always made it difficult for security service providers to develop rapid-response capabilities. The LimaCharlie SecOps Cloud Platform (SCP) has a unique public cloud delivery model that gives MSSPs a new way to improve their response times and offer better SLAs.The SCP’s public cloud-like delivery and billing model levels the playing field. Now every MSSP can pre-deploy enterprise-grade cybersecurity infrastructure to client environments—and do it at near-zero cost.
Cost-effective rapid response: Too much to ask?
MSSPs and MDRs are on call 24/7/365, and incident responders are ready to go at a moment’s notice. But IR teams can only act at the speed of their tools—and their tool vendors. For this reason, trying to deploy security infrastructure to a client environment during an active incident can be frustrating.For one thing, traditional cybersecurity tool vendors may make it hard to change the scale of a deployment or customize a toolset to the needs of a particular engagement, even when IR teams already have a relationship with them. On the client side, getting a local IT group to approve and facilitate the deployment of security tools into their environment can also be time-consuming.When teams have to onboard a new tool to respond to an incident, things get even trickier. MSSPs will most likely have to talk to a salesperson, negotiate a contract or license agreement, and deal with other forms of vendor gatekeeping before the incident responders can get started.To state the obvious: When the clock’s ticking, this is simply not good enough.The alternative? Pre-deploy security infrastructure to client environments so IR teams can respond quickly when a critical incident occurs.But here too, there’s a major stumbling block: Maintaining security tools on every endpoint in an organization is cost prohibitive for most service providers. For everyone but the very largest of MSSPs, this approach is a non-starter.So, given the limitations of traditional security vendors, how can MSSPs and MDRs improve their IR times and offer more competitive service-level agreements?The answer is straightforward: Leverage the capabilities of a non-traditional security vendor.Build a rapid-response capability with SCP sleeper deployments
The LimaCharlie SecOps Cloud Platform (SCP) is based on the premise that the public cloud model that has worked so well for IT can also work for cybersecurity. Our approach is to offer core cybersecurity infrastructure on demand, API-first, and pay-per-use—and deliver everything through a unified platform that provides multi-tenancy, customizability, and extensive automation capabilities as core features.The SCP’s non-traditional pricing and delivery model has many benefits, but one of the most significant for MSSPs is that it lets them pre-deploy security infrastructure to client environments at a fraction of the cost of a traditional vendor.Here’s how it works:- Pre-deploy the SCP’s lightweight, multi-platform agent to some or all endpoints in a client’s environment.
- Use the SCP to apply a simple tag to these agents that puts them in “sleeper mode.” In sleeper mode, the agents stay connected to the SCP, and are ready and waiting on client endpoints, but do not collect any telemetry data on the host, keeping costs extremely low.
- Usage-based billing ensures that MSSPs only pay for the connected time of agents in sleeper mode. Typically, this comes out to pennies per endpoint per month. That cost can either be absorbed by the service provider, or, since SCP billing is transparent and predictable, passed on to the client as part of their regular invoice.
- In the event of an incident, the pre-deployed SCP sensors can be activated with a simple command. Within minutes, responders gain a presence on client endpoints—and access to the full power of the SCP’s endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities, which includes the ability to collect and analyze telemetry data from any source, isolate compromised hosts on the network, take direct response actions on endpoints, deploy remediation packages, and more.
