Cyber Defense Magazine - Annual RSA Conference 2019 - Print Edition

‘To Be or Not To Be’: Here’s
How SMBs Can Affordably
Protect Themselves
aiMSSP Enables Managed Security Service Providers to Deliver
Comprehensive, Affordable, Integrated Security Services to
Small-to-Medium Businesses and Enterprises
by Arun Gandhi, Director of Product Management, Seceon
Today threat surfaces have broaden
significantly and security teams have to defend
against sophisticated cyber-attacks, such as,
Ransomware, Distributed Denial of Service
(DDOS), Inside threats, Vulnerability exploits,
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), Email
phishing, to list few. Cybercrime is developing
much faster than security tools, adoption
and proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT)
increasing the risk of a breach, and cloud and
virtualization trends are set to be main pain
points for organizations in three years’ time.
Many small-to-medium businesses (SMBs)
and enterprises think they’re flying under
the radar of cyber-attackers. But the reality
is very different. Perpetrators specifically
target smaller, more vulnerable businesses
because of their lack of security expertise and
fragile infrastructure, and because they often
provide easy entryways to larger companies
with whom the SMBs work. Empirical data
shows SMBs have high security-related risks
that can be extremely detrimental to their
existence, compared to larger organizations.
According to Hiscox’s Cyber Preparedness
Report 2017, small businesses lose an average
of $41,000 per cybersecurity incident. They
are the hardest hit most often, although
their breaches may not make headline news.
More alarmingly, over 60 percent of the
SMB enterprises go out of business within six
months of devastating cyberattacks.
SMBs typically have a shoe string IT &
security budget and very limited expertise
with cutting-edge tools. Therefore they must
lean on Managed Security Service Providers
(MSSPs) to help them attain a shield of
protection that small-to-medium businesses
need for their very existence. MSSPs offer
superior protection, cost savings, customer
support, advanced technology to the SMBs
without the need of making significant
investments, and enables businesses to focus
on their core competency to increase their
bottom-line. Key MSSP services include:
• Outsourced, advanced-tier
24x7 monitoring of security events and
management. This is a cost-effective
alternative to having dedicated in-house staff
managing security events.
• Deep threat intelligence covering
a wider security landscape, such as device
management, breach monitoring, data loss
prevention, insider threat detection, phishing
attacks, web exploits, and more.
• Incident response to contain and
eliminate cyber threats in near real-time and
keep your business running.
Cyber Defense Magazine - Annual Print Edition 2019 73