Have you got a way to monitor the devices that access your data and applications on your network? How do you spot nefarious activity on the network? If you can’t answer either of these questions, this blog is for you. We’ll tell you about a quick, easy and low-fuss way to solve these problems.

Monitoring your organisation's assets (endpoints) that access your business data and applications' activity must be an important plank of any proactive approach to cyber security.

As we have moved from working in the office to working any time, on any device, from anywhere, it’s more essential now than ever to firstly understand what assets you have that are accessing your organisation's data, and then secondary apply appropriate controls in place to maintain security such as MDB and MAM.

We are no longer separating the security of your computers and mobile devices, they are all the same when they access your data and applications.

This makes the role of the IT manager harder, just as the risk from malicious attacks grows stronger: cyber-criminal activity has risen during the pandemic.

But there is an easy way to keep track of the endpoint devices by monitoring compliance: a comprehensive security information and event management (SIEM) software.

This is a solution that monitors and maintains the endpoint compliance in order to identify a range of exploits, including zero-day attacks, DDOS attacks, non-malware attacks, and other well-known tactics.

Choosing a security information and event management solution

Microsoft offers its own SIEM solution: Azure Sentinel. This has the benefits of being a cloud-based solution and all the advantages that implies: no need for expensive on-premises hardware, easy to scale up and down, priced as a service, plus all the development clout of Microsoft behind it.

This is a great solution to help enterprises monitor their networks and to quickly identify suspicious activity.

The drawbacks?

It’s not so suited to small and medium-sized businesses.

Why?

Because it needs a team of experienced engineers sitting on the end of it, interpreting the information, prioritising risks and escalating any necessary actions or remedial actions. Employing such experienced individuals isn’t easy. Finding people with the right skills is difficult. And it doesn’t come cheap. The cost of running such a team 24/7 to identify risks and act to mitigate them is, therefore, out of reach of most small and mid-size businesses.

What can small and mid-size businesses do to identify the risks?

There is a simple and cost-effective solution that helps organisations to manage these risks and identify suspicious activity quickly without having to invest heavily in staffing costs, software or hardware. Like most things in IT right now, the solution is available to purchase as a service.

Grant McGregor has teamed up with some of the leaders in the field of mobile device management (MDM) and active monitoring and response (AMR) in order to create a comprehensive solution that is ideal for small and medium-size businesses and organisations that don’t have the internal IT expertise necessary to carry such a team: our managed detection and response services.

This gives all organisations the opportunity to access effective managed detection and response services, including endpoint monitoring and security analytics. We provide the solutions, staff, processes, and incident response plan and associated services to identify concerns and take the necessary actions.

This includes:

• Identifying and validating security events

• Raising a case for each new security concern

• Designating an event as an incident with an identified severity level

• Prioritising incidents: low, medium or high severity

• Gathering all necessary information about the event and conveying information to resolve the incident

• Taking necessary action in response to high severity incidents

This activity is undertaken on a 24/7/365 basis. You don’t need to worry about covering weekends, out-of-hours, holidays or sickness periods because the service is delivered seamlessly on a continuous basis.

It takes the stress out of cyber security monitoring and response and ensures that you aren’t in the dark about the very real threats to your organisation’s cyber security.

That’s why we think this is a really important service for every organisation. And choosing managed detection and response functions as a service helps to make it affordable and actionable for every organisation, no matter how small. We recommend it across the board and especially if you are dealing with sensitive or personal data.

What next?

If you’d like a professional system for identifying unusual and malicious activity on your network and across your mobile device estate, this is one option that is particularly affordable and fast to implement and easy to manage moving forwards.

To find out more and discuss whether it could help your organisation to identify and mitigate risks, please speak with the Grant McGregor team. You can reach us below: