It seems like hardly a week goes by without another high-profile data breach making the headlines. Not even data fortresses like Facebook seem to be safe, proving that even industry leaders make slip-ups that can lead to severe security compromises.
With a boom in device presence on enterprise networks and a continued inadequacy of endpoint security, point solutions can’t possibly keep up, even as the information security field continues to stamp them out in record numbers, with over 1200 on the market today. Companies still respond by recruiting more information security personnel, but supply simply can’t keep up with demand–without a new approach, sooner or later we will reach the breaking point.
While it might be easy to despair, it doesn’t make for a much of a security strategy. Your customers can’t insulate themselves from every breach, but they can adopt a posture that values proactive solutions and rapid response.
What is SOCaaS?
Empowering end users to think holistically about their information security strategy and migrate to a proactive attitude means being able to offer them the right tools for the job, and for the way they do that job. Not only do these tools need to embody good security fundamentals, but they also need to parse events in real time around the clock and alert your customers’ security incident responders the moment a security breach occurs. Even better, your solutions should give your end users the option to deploy automated remediation processes that take action immediately.
Security Operations Center-as-a-Service (SOCaaS) is a cloud-based monitoring and analysis solution that detects security events in real time and provides incident management tailored to comply with appropriate industry regulations. This unique approach gives your end users the ability to outsource their network security operations to a dedicated team of engineers and security professionals operating 24×7 to spot breach incidents as they happen and respond surgically and immediately.
Overwatch by High Wire Networks offers a quantum leap improvement over the basic SOCaaS concept by augmenting the manual review process with machine learning and artificial intelligence, delivering faster response time to your customers by advanced threat behavior recognition, and cutting down on false positives by filtering out network chatter. These automation mechanisms and expert oversight also give your clients the ability to tap into automatic remediation for lightning reaction time.
As much as AI brings into the picture, there is more than one key component that goes into a top-tier SOCaaS solution. Here are the ones that let our Overwatch SOCaaS solution stand out.
1. Services tailored to your brand
No two resellers are exactly the same, and customers would be rightly reluctant to place their trust in a reseller if they were. Earning your trust, and maintaining the trust in your brand, is our number one priority, and that means letting you control your brand 100%. That’s why we give you the choice to private-label your Overwatch SOCaaS solution (and all of Overwatch) or to co-brand with Overwatch.
Overwatch also lets your brand’s substance shine through in more ways than just the label, but also via the security features you bundle into your SOCaaS solution. We understand that your customers’ security requirements, and therefore your own, run the gamut, so we structure our SOCaaS to easily conform to the functionality tweaks you need to make.
All of that is why we make a point to ensure to all of our channel partners that we adjust to your business, including
- your key business objectives,
- your incident reporting thresholds and appetite for risk,
- your operational environment, and
- the length of time you need your data to be retained.
2. Continuous improvement
Any SOCaaS provider worth your time to consider should be capable of adapting their offerings to meet the changing needs of their customers and the demands of an evolving threat landscape. This requires striking the right balance between cutting down false positives and quickly identifying and acting on breaches as they unfold. And on top of all that, this dynamic has to stay balanced as new threats come into focus.
Overwatch’s hybrid approach, combining a highly trained security staff with best-in-class machine learning and AI, gives our SOCaaS the flexibility to evolve as new events are parsed and correlated while still submitting potential breach incidents to human review. By building off of this foundation, partners can interweave their own insights and deliver the aggregate to the end user.
3. Regulatory compliance
Because regulatory compliance is a critical consideration for end users, the versatility to offer an array of built-in regulatory options is crucial for resellers as well. Besides providing a convenient means of implementing sound business practices, baked-in regulatory structures can also save your customers heavy fines.
A SOCaaS solution should extend compliance reporting and log retention options for the regulations governing the industries that your end users operate in. Some of the big ones, which no SOCaaS can afford to overlook, include HIPAA, PCI, and NIST, among others.
There are many puzzle pieces that make up the compliance picture, but a SOCaaS should handle data privacy, log collection and retention, forensic capability, firewall zoning, network mapping, and encryption signatures. And of course, a SOCaaS solution needs to execute regular assessments of vulnerabilities in end-user environments, to reduce the cost and time of preparing an audit, if and when that becomes necessary.
We bundle all of this into Overwatch’s SOCaaS right off the bat, from the templates referenced to ensure proper monitoring, to the compliance reports and documents generated on demand. Our SOCaaS also ships with tools for extending auditor access to compliance reports so that all stakeholders are on the same page.
4. Uninterrupted network and cloud monitoring
Attackers don’t all work from 9 to 5, so why should your end users have to? The answer is a SOCaaS that continuously monitors your customers’ networks and scans for vulnerabilities and malicious activity 24×7.
The Overwatch SOCaaS goes beyond simply monitoring your customers’ operations without interruption but, rather, lets you offer a dynamic solution that learns from their network activity to set an individualized baseline. This turns a constant watchful eye into one that knows what to look for and accounts for user behavior as it changes over time.
5. Manual and automated containment
Once identified, an incident needs to be contained quickly to isolate and neutralize it while maintaining network uptime and legitimate user access. The threat ecosystem continues to evolve, and end user IT personnel will sometimes elect to contain threats themselves, but a SOCaaS solution can equip them to implement threat-specific solutions however they see fit.
Overwatch’s SOCaaS lets you notify your end users in real time, and gives them the choice of manual intervention of automatic execution of threat containment according to a predefined set of rules. This backend automation lets you reduce the burden on customer IT teams and also delivers quick and efficient containment outside of their normal business hours.
6. Scalable Infrastructure
Scaling is about more than just addressing the business needs of resellers, or offering a one-size-fits-all approach. Being able to scale storage and computing resources on demand will supply your customers with a SOCaaS solution that keeps pace with their business as it grows, and with the evolution of threats as they pertain specifically to them.
Overwatch takes care of scaling your SOCaaS product so you don’t have to. This lets you worry about building your brand instead of whether your product’s backend can handle your customers. It also leads to dead-simple pricing that not only lets your customers budget their security dollars predictably every month but further builds trust in your brand with a transparent pricing model.
The Power of SOCaaS
As attackers continue to drive the information security arms race and impose new challenges on organizations of all sizes and industries, a new approach to data security becomes necessary. The current spectrum of point solutions impose few obstacles in the way of attackers bypassing traditional perimeter controls and sitting on target networks undetected for extended periods of time.
SOCaaS offers another way forward, positioning resellers to offer products that are adaptive, responsive and persistent. With Overwatch’s SOCaaS, you as a channel partner can continue to build trust among your customers while delivering constant monitoring that evolves and responds in a way that only AI can, while keeping your users in the driver’s seat with compliance implementation and incident handling. With Overwatch, you deliver proactive security to your clients on time, on your terms, on their needs.
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