Strategies for Supercharging Small Security Teams

The following post is a re-formatted showcase piece, written by Enterprise Strategies Group Principal Analyst Dave Gruber, with data taken from the Enterprise Strategy Group Research Reports 2023 Ransomware Preparedness* and SOC Modernization and the Role of XDR, October 2022**. 

Abstract: Building an effective security program with limited resources can seem like an insurmountable task for many small and midsize organizations. Specialized strategies are needed and should be crafted to proactively guide local resources in strengthening security posture and in rapid remediation of threats.

New solutions, architected specifically for resource-challenged organizations, are combining automated, assistive technologies and threat detection experts to combine up-to-date detection rules with easily understood response guidance. These solutions from providers such as Blumira are enabling existing IT resources to defend their organization effectively and efficiently from cyber attacks.

Overview – The Problem

Small and midsize organizations often feel constrained in their ability to effectively secure their operation against the growing cybersecurity threat. Yet complex threats like ransomware can have the same catastrophic impact on smaller companies, leaving many at a loss for how to implement and manage an effective security program on a limited budget. According to Enterprise Strategy Group research, 63% of midsize organizations, being less mature and less prepared to detect, respond, and recover from cyber attacks than enterprises—with 76% of these in the novice or aspiring stages of preparedness—report experiencing ransomware attacks in the past year.*

While IT heroes within these organizations often wear multiple hats—managing systems, networks, laptops, applications, and security—many lack skills or cycles to architect and manage their own security systems architecture. This drives many to depend on all-in-one solutions that often lack the capabilities needed to properly secure the operation. Despite their size, small and midsize organizations still want and need both control and visibility into the security of their entire environment to be able to effectively deliver on availability, reliability, regulatory compliance, and cyber insurance requirements. How can small and midsize organizations achieve these outcomes while maintaining control of their IT operating environment?

5 Key Challenges

1. Lack of security expertise. With limited ability to hire full-time security professionals and limited time to invest in advancing security skills, many struggle to effectively triage, investigate, and respond to security threats.
2. Team size. Stretched thin, time-strapped, limited IT teams are often responsible for both IT and security functions. At the same time, security solutions can require time-intensive manual activities, like parsing data, threat investigations, threat hunting, threat research, and detection rules engineering. According to Enterprise Strategy Group research, midsize organizations’ top three challenges are struggling to keep up with the volume of security alerts, operationalizing threat intelligence to drive meaningful outcomes, and monitoring security across a growing and changing attack surface.**
3. Limited visibility. With a growing consumption of cloud-delivered applications and services, IT leaders within smaller organizations find themselves responsible for managing and securing a combination of onpremises systems together with a growing number of cloud applications. While the use of cloud and SaaS applications can help reduce IT infrastructure and administration requirements, they can also create visibility challenges, further complicating detection and investigations.
4. Challenging compliance requirements. Compliance and cyber insurance call for many different security capabilities, including log monitoring, log review, analysis, anomaly detection, endpoint security, and incident response, often exceeding available resources.
5. Budget constraints. The cost of a comprehensive security technology stack often exceeds available budgets, leaving many to make tradeoffs between security and operational growth investments.

Strategies for Securing Small and Midsize Businesses

Overcoming these challenges requires a new approach to security operations that includes:

• Fewer tools capable of automating more things, enabling small teams to succeed with limited personnel and budget.
• Pre-vetting and communicating alerts and detections in clear, easy-to-understand terms to make them manageable for small teams.
• Fast, clear, rapid-remediation steps that IT resources can implement, since speed of remediation is critical for a small organization.
• Detection rules that are kept current by the solution provider because limited staff numbers and security skills inhibit detection rules engineering activities.
• Visibility and data retention for historical activities, as regulatory requirements must still be met, regardless of an organization’s size.
• Tools that interoperate out of the box because integrations with other security controls often require custom engineering, which is out of reach for many small teams.

Introducing Blumira

Blumira’s detection and response platform enables faster threat resolution to help stop ransomware attacks and prevent data breaches.

Built specifically for small to midsize businesses, Blumira delivers the power of a SIEM solution with extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities, without the high implementation and maintenance costs typically required for data ingest, detection rules engineering, and playbook development. This unique approach enables smaller IT organizations to achieve superior security results, without the complexity and staffing typically needed to achieve similar outcomes.

Highly tuned detection rules combined with automated response capabilities and easy-to-understand remediation guidance ensure smaller teams can keep up with the fast-moving threat landscape. Blumira’s all-in-one XDR platform delivers:

• Cloud-delivered SIEM, correlating threat signals, detecting threats, and retaining data to meet regulatory requirements.
• Highly optimized detection rules developed and managed by Blumira security engineers, which eliminates the need for hiring local detection engineers.
• Easy-to-implement playbooks for every detection.
• Automated response actions to immediately contain and block threats.
• Advanced reporting and dashboards for forensics and easy investigations.
• Prebuilt cloud connectors to leverage and integrate existing IT and security tools.
• A lightweight endpoint agent for clear visibility and rapid response.
• Open architecture, enabling third-party integrations for wider coverage.
• One year of data retention with an option to extend to satisfy regulatory compliance.
• 24/7 Security operations (SecOps) support for critical priority issues.

Conclusion

Small organizations face an uphill battle to build strategies to keep up with the rapidly changing cyberthreat landscape. With limited budgets and staffing, build-your-own strategies can feel unachievable, while outsourced approaches using third-party security service providers can feel like handing over the keys to the core operating infrastructure that fuels the operation.

New approaches are emerging that enable small organizations to achieve desired security program results using hybrid offerings that both consolidate multiple key product capabilities into one integrated solution and respect the need for local control, while providing proven security operating systems and models. These solutions enable existing IT resources to defend their organization effectively and efficiently from cyber attacks while meeting regulatory compliance requirements.

Enterprise Strategy Group recommends IT and security leaders within small and midsize organizations who want to accelerate security program outcomes explore new solutions from vendors such as Blumira.

About Enterprise Strategy Group

TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group provides focused and actionable market intelligence, demand-side research, analyst advisory services, GTM strategy guidance, solution validations, and custom content supporting enterprise technology buying and selling.

This Enterprise Strategy Group Showcase was commissioned by Blumira and is distributed under license from TechTarget, Inc.