If you are connected to the internet, you are under attack right now…Are you monitoring or watching your IT ecosystem, if you are not how would you know? Most small to midsize businesses (SMB’s) are not watching their IT ecosystem. They install a firewall and put virus protection on their endpoints and truly believe they are secure enough. On average, it takes 205 days to discover that a breach has occurred… Normally it is a third party who discovers the breach. Think of it this way, a burglar breaks into your house, drinks your milk, eats your cookies, sleeps in your bed, watches your TV, brings their friends over to have a wild party at your house… All the while you are unaware they are even there…until your neighbor calls the police to let them know there is some unusual behavior going on next door.

Additionally, SMB’s think they are too small for an attack or don’t have anything worth stealing. However, hackers, cybercriminals, and nation states are increasingly targeting SMB’s, knowing that those companies will not have the people, processes or tools to detect or respond to an attack. Also, maintaining a secure IT ecosystem is not in the forefront of most SMB owners’ minds. Cybersecurity, a discipline that has been relegated to the back corners of IT… needs to move to the forefront in an SMB IT ecosystem.

As SMB’s continue to send business critical information over the internet, utilizing cloud services, and depending on third party services, it’s more important than ever to have a solid security strategy in place. Over the last several decades, a growing number of network security solutions have been developed to assist businesses. Unfortunately, most of these are all enterprise-level security solutions that only customers with the right budget can afford. What about SMB’s that still need a way to detect and respond to potential security threats?

To properly secure an SMB’s IT ecosystem, on top of installing and operating firewalls and endpoint security, they need to implement a monitoring solution that has the people, processes and tools that can detect attacks and unusual activities as they occur in their IT ecosystem. Unfortunately, for many SMB’s when they are looking at monitoring solutions, they are looking at just the tools side of the solution and there are cost effective tool solutions in the market place. However, the tool is only part of the solution, I would argue that SMB’s need the defenders (People and Processes) more so than just the tool. Tools in the hands of untrained staff, will be unused, unwanted and will not provide the benefit of a turnkey solution.

SMB’s need to build or hire a cybersecurity team that understands there is no silver bullet that will solve any cybersecurity situation. The goal needs to be reduction in the detection time, so that a rapid response and eradication can occur. The cybersecurity team needs to leverage their training processes and tools to contain and troubleshoot active attackers, throughout your IT ecosystem. In many cases, an SMB created cybersecurity team, is an “other duties as assigned,” responsibility for their staff. This means they are not focused on the defending the SMB’s IT ecosystem. Therefore, they may not be able to recognize an attack and prioritize the response, before damage can occur.

Outsourcing this very specialized skill set to a team of experts who are defending and responding to many security events for many customers every day, is a very cost effective way to defend your IT ecosystem. For example, we developed InfusionPoints’ VNSOC360 services directly with the SMB in mind, to be a very cost effective solution. We have the people, processes, and tools to defend your IT ecosystem. We train our VNSOC360 analysts vigorously in our VNSOC360 cyber security center’s research lab by running real world attack and defend scenarios. We have developed a set of proactive troubleshooting and incident response processes which are synchronized with each other. Our state of the art VNSOC360 facility, leverages the best of breed decision support tools that assist our VNSOC360 analysts and provide information for our processes to better prioritize security events as they occur. All three of these components working in harmony, allows us in near-real time, to contain and eradicate real threats as they happen.

Bottom line, SMB’s that are looking to improve their cyber security posture and speed up breach detection, need to deploy the right tool, train your people how to use the tools properly, and develop the processes necessary to incorporate the tool into the overall program…Or better yet, hire an expert team of professionals to support your needs.

Contact us for a free Security Operations readiness review.