Running a CUSO with multiple data centers, I sometimes feel like a connoisseur of security products. Over the years we have used many different products to detect and defend against the latest attack du jour. In the 90’s we had viruses, which were joined by worms in 2000, spyware and rootkits in 2005, and advanced persistent threats or APTs and ransomware in 2015. There have been polymorphic viruses, Trojan downloaders such as Zeus and crypto lock, phishing & pharming attempts, SQL injections, keystroke loggers, and denial of service attacks. Let’s not forget one of my personal favorites, the Bot Net Robot Networks (love the name).
I wish I had an easy way to add up the cost of defending each of these attacks over the years both in terms of the products and manpower, but that would be a daunting task for even the best accounting department.
Our largest IT spend in recent years has been on cyber security. We purchased many security products, and the hardware, appliances, and infrastructure necessary to run and maintain them. We needed to hire and train expensive employees and their backups to understand and manage these products. To add insult to injury, many of these high priced security products didn’t integrate with one another, creating more work checking log files and reports.
The reason I am mentioning this is to tell you that our data center has moved to what I consider the next generation of cyber security. The all-in-one…Dilly Dilly. The all-in-one provides many cyber security services all under one robust product. This allows us to train multiple individuals to use the same product and back each other up. It also reduces the maintenance and hardware costs of running the same functionality with multiple products.
Products such as Crowdstrike, zScaler, OpaqNetworks, and CU Assured provide insight into networks with a single pane of glass. Many applications work in concert with one another, providing better protection for our data centers. During an extreme weather incident last year, our all-in-one detected a huge wave of attacks coming from a foreign state. We elected to geo-block the entire country until the morning. Our all-in-one picked up the incident immediately, but our legacy products never detected anything. When I asked others in our area running data centers about the APT, they weren’t aware of anything.
At United Solutions, we already have best of breed protection products to defend our network. However, detection is often times the biggest problem. Many organizations have their detection ratcheted down to the level of their protection so that valid products and services aren’t impacted. By separating the detection from prevention, USC is able to set our detection incredibly high. We are able to monitor assets & inventory, SIEM & log management, intrusion detection, behavioral monitoring, vulnerability scans, and compliance reporting across all of our network with one security product. Our solution is hosted and easily managed, and the data never leaves our site. The all-in-one cyber security product is the next generation of cyber security.
Learn more about our All-In-One solution here.
