Liberty Technology has always made it a priority to participate in events, from educational lunch and learns to customer appreciation VIP day at Porsche Driving Experience. As an active member of The Channel Company community, this year we attended the Midsize Enterprise Summit in San Diego as a vendor. This group of mid-size technology directors face unique challenges and technology pain points. They’re very often facing heavy demands with small teams and budgets.
This year’s event featured a workshop the day after the summit specifically targeted to security needs. As a vendor, Liberty had one-on-one conversations and gave Cisco Stealthwatch demos during the Solutions Pavilion, as well as presenting at the security workshop. In spending time with attendees, it was clear that most midsize organizations don’t have CISOs, so the burden of security needs falls on the CIOs. They need appropriately scaled solutions to help them manage increasing security threats. Here’s a summary of the insights that we shared with these business leaders. But first, watch our recap video:
Organizations are spending tons of money on security, yet breaches are still inevitable.
Recent reports put security spending at $96 billion this year, but 66 percent of companies are reporting breaches – multiple ones. And the cost of a breach in buyer confidence and in dollars (estimated at $500,000 to $20 million) would mean closing the doors for many midmarket enterprises. It’s become a game of “whack a mole” – a new threat type is discovered and a new point solution to address that threat type immediately goes to market. Unfortunately, all these solutions increase complexity more than they increase security. The more solutions you add, the more difficult it is to correlate all that information and see what needs to be addressed.
You can’t fight what you can’t see. Visibility is the cornerstone of your defense.
It’s not enough to compile the data; we need to gain real insight into attackers’ behaviors. The industry average for detecting a network threat is 197 days. That means if a coworker clicks on the wrong link or attachment today, on average the threat wouldn’t be detected until around mid-April of 2019.
And, perhaps more surprisingly, even after threats are detected, an average of 54 percent of them go unremediated. Most often that’s because the various security solutions don’t work together. An effective security solution needs to communicate and share data from cloud, network, and endpoints – compiling the intel in one place so you can actually identify the real threat instead of spending valuable time sifting through all the noise. Then, once that threat is identified…
The way you respond to a security event determines its impact.
How you react is critical. Research reveals that it takes an actual incident to motivate many organizations to patch critical vulnerabilities – even foreknowledge of an active exploit isn’t enough. It isn’t because people are indifferent or lazy; it’s simply because digital transformation is happening at a pace beyond all anticipation, which is greatly increasing demand on IT staff.
Conversely, to be effective, security is inherently complex. Successfully thwarting cyberattacks requires sophisticated detection, with real-time response, prioritization, and threat intelligence to help you stay ahead of attacks. What’s more, it’s absolutely crucial to train users about new and advancing attack strategies. Good news is, we can help.
Liberty Technology has a hybrid solution to immediately increase your effectiveness.
We can say this with confidence because we’ve built our own security systems through layering components of Cisco’s Security Architecture scaled to specific needs. Our defense layer of protection is powered by Talos, one of the largest threat intelligence teams in the world – blocking over 20 billion threats each day with an average detection time of 4.6 hours.
We are currently setting appointments to help identify and remedy security gaps in your current solutions – at no cost or obligation to you. Give us a call at 770-800-0537, and begin to experience what we mean by Freedom Through Technology.
