Blog: Cybersecurity

How to Select a Strategic Data Breach Prevention Partner

June 15, 2021 - by Synoptek

Preventing breaches is a top-of-mind business priority for every organization. Gartner has recognized this need as a growing business trend. Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services will be used by 50% of enterprises by 2025 for threat monitoring, detection, and response functions. MDR, simply defined, are vital services that accelerate a security program by detecting security attacks and containing them before they can cause too much damage.

However, the MDR market is quickly becoming saturated with what’s called “guidance only” services. ‘Guidance only’ services mean that MDR partners offering these services will detect security attacks and will only guide you toward the next steps. You will be required to manage all the nitty-gritty work of containing and remediating a breach yourself. This article summarizes the essential capabilities organizations must look for in an MDR services offering, and how to select a strategic data breach prevention partner.

Before You Build Your Breach Prevention Strategy

Before moving to the essential elements of MDR services, you must identify the gaps in your security program’s detection and response capabilities.

According to Gartner, the following are the basic capabilities that must be found in any Detection and Response service:

  • Technologies that assist in detection, investigation, and response to threats
  • Staff skilled in threat monitoring, detection and hunting, threat intelligence, and incident response
  • Business processes that include a standard playbook of workflows and procedures

The following are best-of-breed capabilities to prioritize:

  • Detection of attacks that have bypassed protections
  • Investigation and containment actions beyond alert and notification
  • Ability to rapidly scale to the provisioning agility of cloud services
  • Shared ownership: i.e., a response SLA or a statement of accountability

Does your company feel like it is missing any of these basic capabilities? If so, MDR services might be the answer to your problems. Here’s a sampling of what you can expect from an ideal MDR service to aid in data breach prevention.

1. Operated by Humans, Assisted by Machines

Synoptek’s MDR team consists of a 24/7 EOC, NOC, and SOC that works around the clock to contain threats. Powering this team is a fully managed global SIEM network triaging billions of events a day paired with a global threat intelligence database, user entity, and behavior analytics (UEBA) that detects anomalous activity. This kind of activity might expose itself as events that don’t commonly occur.

2. 24/7 Tailored Security Playbooks

According to Forrester, “security response should come from your playbooks, not vendor APIs”, implying that a guidance-only MDR service may rely on Endpoint agent APIs to contain breaches autonomously. However, this response typically comes in the form of isolation or disconnecting the endpoint from the network. The extent of this type of response can be highly disruptive. An intelligent attacker will launch a precision attack to cause isolation of a mission-critical IT infrastructure and stop all business activities. While containing the threat, this would exacerbate the burden of response and encourage submission to cybercriminal demands.

Therefore, Synoptek tailors your playbook and performs response actions across endpoints, networks, and identity and access management tools to minimize disruption while allowing business continuity. For many of our customers, this means understanding the context for a business process, the technology, and the IT infrastructure that supports the business process as well as having full ownership for the management and security controls to go beyond isolating the endpoint. Our security playbook is designed with customers’ inputs and is tailored with a mix of automated and manual processes, everything from “Call John” to “automatically block this user if he logs in from outside the U.S.”

3. Single-source Provider for Data Breach Prevention

Finally, the most vital step is choosing the right strategic breach prevention partner. Synoptek can be your single-source provider for Managed Technology and Managed Response because we share IT availability and security response accountability using the same Service Level Objectives. This includes targeted uptime and response turnaround. Our IT availability services are backed by Service Level Guarantees. These services give clients money back if there is missed representation and you shouldn’t settle for anything less. At Synoptek, we are eager to hear feedback from our clients. We are here for you!

Check out Synoptek’s MDR service to learn more and to understand how Synoptek’s MDR service can help you in your breach prevention journey, contact our experts.

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