Revolutionizing Government Cybersecurity: Ottawa County’s Journey with Blumira

For IT teams at mid-sized organizations, the responsibilities of maintaining operations, uptime, and local government cyber security can quickly become overwhelming.

Ottawa County’s small IT staff supports a complex environment across 17 townships and various departments including the sheriff’s office, parks, community health, and more. On top of daily tasks, they must comply with regulations like CJIS, IRS Pub 1075, and HIPAA.

Manually reviewing logs to meet government cyber security mandates seemed impossible without a larger team. Ottawa County needed an automated cyber security for government solution that could enhance security visibility and compliance without more headcount.

The Challenges of Securing a Vast Government IT Environment

With over 200 servers and 150+ network devices like switches and firewalls across various departments, Ottawa County has an expansive attack surface to monitor. Their infrastructure includes on-premises data centers as well as cloud applications like Office 365. 

This vast, complex infrastructure made comprehensive log reviews nearly impossible for Ottawa County’s small IT staff, and meeting rigorous compliance mandates seemed out of reach without a larger team manually parsing through alerts.

The county organization relies on Canadian IT solutions provider Access Interactive, who recommended the Blumira SIEM platform. After reviewing several options over 6 months, Blumira stood out for its ease of use, rapid time-to-value, and cost-effectiveness.

Rapid Time-to-Value with Blumira SIEM

Within days of deploying Blumira, Ottawa County was ingesting logs from their cloud apps like Office 365, endpoint security tools, firewalls, servers, and more. The pre-configured detections immediately strengthened their security posture while reducing manual oversight.

Blumira, a leading cyber security solution for local government, automatically monitors the county’s complex environment and alerts on high-risk threats like password spraying attacks. fThe platform detected and helped block a breach attempt through a compromised local government email account.

Ottawa County’s IT team no longer needs to manually review every log to meet compliance regulations. Automated, optimized alerts from the Blumira SIEM provide the required visibility into potential security events.

According to Technical Infrastructure Manager Mike Morrow, Blumira “has saved us time because we can’t monitor all of our logs — we would need a team of 100 to go through all of these logs manually.” The solution avoided the need for additional headcount while improving Ottawa County’s security.

Read the full Ottawa County case study here.