You can’t secure what you can’t see. That saying may feel obvious, but too many managed service providers (MSPs) fail to see advanced threats as they make their way into and through their customers’ systems.
This is partially because MSPs have too many tools feeding them more information than their staff can handle, and partially because those tools are siloed off and improperly managed, preventing comprehensive information and complete understanding of what’s happening within a customer’s IT infrastructure.
Without proper staffing and alignment, the telemetry provided by tooling is incomplete. For MSPs, this leads to ignored or overlooked sections of their customer’s environment, which could result in a major breach. This can cause engineers to spend countless man hours sifting through alerts that provide incomplete information, and ultimately fail to act on, or miss, potential threats within their customers’ environments.
The answer, then, is not tools aimed at specific aspects of an environment, but an approach that looks at everything, cross-references the telemetry gathered, and provides a birds-eye view. The answer is holistic visibility.
Learn more about the various sources of telemetry with “Seeing Is Securing: Holistic Visibility.”
Holistic Visibility Provides Actionable Insights
Let’s imagine you have a security app on your phone that tells you if your front door is open. That’s all it does. It doesn’t tell you if someone entered your home or where the possible intruder went within your house. And, unfortunately, it alerts your phone any time that door is opened, meaning you get a ping if it’s your spouse or your children or even you.
That tool is limited to the door’s actions and doesn’t help you fully understand what’s happening in your home. If you’re away on vacation and you get the alert that your door is opened, you have no way of knowing if it’s a burglar or just the wind.
That’s the problem a lot of MSPs experience when they rely on siloed tools that only detect unusual behavior in a specific part of their customers’ environments, which results in too many alerts and not enough information. This leaves the MSP with an inability to act with precision or intent.
What you would need is an application that combines the door alert with security cameras in and outside the house which can digest that information and offer you a complete picture of what behavior is occurring and if it’s worthy of your attention. It could, through the additional use of human experts, discern between the neighborhood kid coming to water your plants and a robber making a beeline for your office safe at 2 am.
That’s what holistic visibility achieves. It digests and analyzes telemetry from a broad number of sources (endpoints, firewall, cloud, etc.) and then creates a thorough, precise report of what is happening and what actions are needed to contain the possible incident.
As an MSP, having as much information as possible is critical not only for the security of the organizations you manage, but for your business operations. Time spent dealing with incomplete information is time that isn’t spent scaling your business, focusing on your security, or exceeding the needs of your customers.
This approach is proactive, impactful, and removes silos to provide high-fidelity alerting, which reduces false positives by chaining alerts together and only notifying organizations if there is a fully developed detection.
Holistic visibility is not a tool but a thorough approach to cybersecurity. Learn more about how holistic visibility can improve your cybersecurity with Arctic Wolf’s interactive tool.
Guest blog courtesy of Arctic Wolf. Read more Arctic Wolf guest blogs here. Regularly contributed guest blogs are part of MSSP Alert’s sponsorship program.
