Businesses are always looking for ways to deliver increased value to clients while optimizing efficiency, and this year is no exception. Digital transformation, remote work, and economic uncertainty are just some of the challenges impacting organizations today. As you plan next year’s budget, it’s a good idea to assess current operational successes and opportunities to increase efficiency and effectiveness. Here are some practical recommendations to increase cybersecurity effectiveness and help you optimize finite budgets and time.

1. Simplify Your Tech Stack

Recent security breaches and ransomware attacks have led to a proliferation in point products that can add complexity and cost. Organizations have an average of 75 security tools, and “tool bloat” requires more experts to hire, train, and operate the technology. You can minimize cyber sprawl in order to enhance security and operational efficiency. According to Ponemon Institute’s “Cost of a Data Breach 2022” report, security system complexity was the top item of 25 that increased data breach costs.

While there’s no silver bullet or single vendor covering the entire threat chain, streamlining your technical infrastructure saves time and money. First, evaluate whether your organization has unused or even unsanctioned applications that create risk and can be jettisoned. Second, lo ok for cybersecurity solutions that improve attack surface coverage and address the broadest vulnerabilities and risks, all tailored to your security posture. Finally, consider integrated solutions like Netsurion’s Managed Open XDR that offers defense-in-depth with single-pane-of-glass visibility and a predict, prevent, detect, and respond approach to advanced threats.

2. Augment Your Staff with Managed Open XDR

The global shortage of over 3 million security professionals has created a cybersecurity staffing crisis. Almost 60% of organizations state that the staffing shortage impacts their risk posture. If you could hire a cybersecurity expert, retaining them over time becomes an even more significant challenge as larger enterprises woo staff away. Managed XDR offers an affordable and flexible approach to enhance your existing staff and technical skills and scale up and down instantly.

With Managed XDR, you receive the Security Operations Center (SOC) “function” in a SaaS model along with cybersecurity experts, comprehensive technologies like SIEM and Endpoint Protection, and managed services like vulnerability assessments and network flow scanning. Our research shows that an in-house SOC requires 9-12 months to implement, involves 12 dedicated professionals for 24/7/365 coverage, and can cost anywhere from $1.5 to $5 million/year. On the other hand, Managed XDR accelerates your security maturity without CAPEX and the challenge of hiring and retaining technical experts. You can rapidly onboard your users with Managed XDR that scales with you.

3. Cloud-Deployed Security Controls Without Hardware

Managed Open XDR can include SaaS-based cloud deployment options. With no hardware to purchase or maintain, cloud-based security controls reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) with a pay-as-you-grow model. The platform is already implemented, provisioned, tested, and often paired with a managed service that speeds up onboarding and time-to-value. SaaS solutions make Work-from-Home (WFH) easy with its anytime, from anywhere access. In addition, a centralized cloud console lets you focus on your business and not on managing hardware. Also, log storage in the cloud scales with your customers to simplifying meeting compliance requirements. To deter today’s financially motivated threat actors, it’s crucial to protect sensitive data with comprehensive visibility across endpoints, mobile devices, and cloud.  

Next Steps

Security complexity is increasing in the face of exploding cyber threats. But there are ways to streamline IT operations and spend, all without sacrificing compliance, data security, and customer engagement:

• Adopt integrated defense-in-depth solutions to predict, prevent, detect, and respond to threats; and reduce the devices and tools you need to manage
• Minimize false positives and empower your existing IT team with Managed Open XDR
• Protect cloud data and SaaS solutions without hardware to buy and sustain

Staying competitive and profitable in this challenging environment requires a unified blend of people, processes, and technology. Whether you are implementing a SOC for the first time or augmenting to add weekend and after-hours coverage, 24/7 cybersecurity analysts in a managed service work as an extension of your in-house team.