Security Leaders are Focusing on Consolidating Their Tech and Vendor Stack -

Author: Paula Rhea, product Marketing manager, Netsurion — **Author:** Paula Rhea, CISSP, product marketing manager, Netsurion

While adding point solutions and vendors to your line card may be easy, a strategic consideration – tied to profitability and staff efficiency - is to consider vendor management and the benefits of tech stack consolidation as a worthwhile step. Service providers often have a hodge-podge of different vendors added over time, sometimes with overlapping functionality and often with time-consuming onboarding and training requirements.

Mid-sized service providers can have hundreds of IT vendors in their infrastructure. Each of these requires your staff to fund, onboard, manage, and maintain over time. IT decision makers may be so hyper-focused on day-to-day operations that they don’t realize this security product proliferation. Each cybersecurity product brings its own console, segmenting visibility, and threat correlation. The result is dangerous blind spots that leave MSPs and enterprises alike vulnerable to damaging exploits.

Fewer vendors mean fewer silos and headaches. Now is a great time to evaluate where you can consolidate and simplify your cybersecurity stack.

Overcome vendor and tool sprawl to achieve these advantages of technology consolidation:

Save time and money by optimizing staff and skills – The current staff and skills shortage make it challenging to achieve 24/7/365 visibility of infrastructure and security posture. Layered security defenses are needed to rapidly mitigate threats posed by persistent and well-funded adversaries. The first tactic used by cyber criminals is to perform reconnaissance against a network, looking for security holes like unpatched vulnerabilities or configuration errors.
“Shortages of the cybersecurity professional that organizations need to act fast enough to keep their data secure have motivated security service providers to move up the stack to offer a breadth of advanced technologies … across multiple environments in a consolidated security platform.” -- IDC Technology Spotlight: The Next Chapter in Managed Security Services is About Consolidation; March 2021, Authors: Martha Vazquez and Craig Robinson.
Improve cybersecurity performance and effectiveness - Endpoint detection and response help ensure that protecting legacy systems is straightforward and cost effective. Traditional anti-virus is no longer sufficient to thwart today’s financially-motivated attackers. Your IT security team along with Netsurion’s Managed Threat Protection platform and SOC can prevent the damage of long-term dwell time.
Respond rapidly when every minute matters – Assume that attackers are getting into your infrastructure, or are already there, so it’s crucial to focus on prevention and early detection through monitoring and analyzing user activity, environment, and deployed technology.
Reduce Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) - Industry reports and numerous surveys confirm that most cyber-attacks are detected on average six-months after the initial breach – this is known as “dwell-time.” Think of it in the context of an older home being eaten away by decay or worse, termites. While not visibly obvious, the structural integrity is being compromised at the support beams, floor joists, posts, ceiling joists and wall studs, rendering it unlivable; the dwell-time is how long it takes for you to detect and respond to your end-clients with remediations. Quick action on your part can minimize the cyber damage.
Boost cybersecurity efficiency by utilizing emerging technology - Machine learning, automation, and big data capabilities enable you to find the proverbial “needle in a haystack” by detecting and alerting on real threats and minimizing false positives. Instead of relying on security analysts to respond to every such incident, cybersecurity platforms such as Netsurion’s Managed Threat Protection use Security Orchestration and Automated Response (SOAR) to reduce response times, accelerate remediation, and increase SOC productivity. More routine threats are neutralized, leaving more complex and sophisticated threats for the 24/7/365 SOC experts to manage. In addition, security automation contributed to the significant reduction of data breach costs according to a recent Ponemon Institute study.

Protecting mission-critical data is paramount, but MSPs must deliver on the security visibility and outcomes that mid-sized organizations need. Consolidation is a crucial method to achieve this layered security.

Next Steps

The security market is heavily fragmented with over 1,000 solutions in dozens of categories; it’s become impossible to manage this patchwork of vendors on your own. Do you and your end customers really need separate vendors for point security needs such as endpoint, threat hunting, SIEM, and now XDR? The answer is no!

To assist MSPs streamline their portfolios and enhance security operations, Netsurion has consolidated its threat management services around the SOC capabilities of SIEM, endpoint protection platform (EPP), EDR, XDR, and UEBA. Learn more about consolidation trends and approaches in this IDC report.

Author Paula Rhea, CISSP, is a product marketing manager at Netsurion, which offers its EventTracker Managed Threat Protection platform. Read more Netsurion guest blogs here.