How to help customers rationalise security portfolios

The world of IT security is becoming ever more complex and riskier.

In conjunction, businesses are seeing their own IT environments become more complicated and distributed. Your customers will be grappling with the likes of multi-cloud environments, remote and hybrid working practices to name but just a few. They need resilient cybersecurity strategies that allow them to run their businesses smoothly, whilst also protecting against any potential security threats.

And let’s not forget about the current economic backdrop. With a tightening of the purse strings there is an ideal opportunity for you to guide your customer through a consolidation process. With everyone painfully aware of the cost-of-living dilemma, how many security products does an organisation need, or use? And with the channel becoming ever more useful as a source of help for customers, this is a great time to offer the expertise and guidance necessary to help customers stay secure in a cost-effective way.

Keeping pace

To keep pace with this evolving threat landscape, most organisations have had to bolt on new cyber security technologies as they’ve become available over the years. There are several ways to address the resulting complexity, but the best approach very much depends on the specific needs and capabilities of each business. In an ideal world or for organisations that are starting out from scratch, a unified platform from a single vendor is the best approach. Visibility is key here - dealing with one vendor who offers a standalone solution and yet another for a different solution, is a sure way to lose sight of the overall picture when it comes to securing any IT estate.

Consider an MSSP

For smaller businesses that do not have the in-house skills, engaging with a Managed Security Services Partner is the best option. Customers can benefit from highly sophisticated cyber security protections, developed, and managed by the MSSP, without needing to have the skills or deal with the complexity themselves. Many SMBs choose to work with a MSSP to mitigate the pressures that they face in all aspects of information security - malware, data theft, skills shortages, limited resources, evolving cyber threats etc. It pays to remember the falsehood that cyber security isn’t as important for SMBs as it is for larger organisations. Cyberthieves are particularly keen to target smaller businesses because they are normally poorly defended from a cybersecurity point of view and offer easy pickings.

Security data

For larger organisations, or indeed MSSPs that have built up their own cyber security capabilities using many point solutions and that are not able to abandon them in favour of a unified platform, there is the option of lowering the complexity and cost of managing the entire stack while also increasing its effectiveness using SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response). SOAR technologies, from vendors like D3, allow larger organisations to collect and aggregate huge quantities of security data and alerts from myriad sources. SOAR allows point solutions from different vendors to be integrated while correlating and automatically making sense from, and prioritising, all the event data coming from those solutions.

SOAR can also help organisations with the very real resource constraints that exist in the cybersecurity market. Businesses of all shapes and sizes are having to deal with a cybersecurity skills gap and SOAR can help to address the talent gap through automation. The technology allows security teams to prioritise the most immediate threats and gives them enough time to deal with them. By automating repetitive tasks, you free up (human) resources allowing you to target areas that require people input.

Now is an ideal time to be helping customers to rationalise security portfolios. With a cost-of-living crisis and challenging economic conditions, your guidance and expertise can help businesses, both small and large, to continue to operate safely and securely in the face of an evolving threat landscape.