For a long time in the cyber security industry, everybody was advised to buy the very best tools for specific jobs, what we call the ‘best-of-breed’ approach. The thinking was that if you could protect your servers with the best server security, your network with the best network security, and so on, then every single entity would be protected in the optimum way.
One of the challenges with this approach was that businesses gradually bought more products from more and more different vendors. Ensuring team members had the necessary skills to properly utilise these tools added an extra challenge, especially when vendors upgraded their products or replaced them with newer ones.
As cybercriminals’ tactics have changed and IT estates have expanded and become more complex, that way of defending organisations is no longer fit for purpose. Today, security professionals are working hard to promote and recommend a new approach: to have a consolidated ‘best-of-suite’ stack where everything is integrated, and all the individual elements ‘communicate’ with each other.
It’s no longer about having hundreds of ‘best-of-breed’ tools that simply don’t work together. Instead, it’s better to have a toolset that does work together, reducing your licensing, maintenance and product management overheads.
For almost ten years, Microsoft has led the way to designing, building and upgrading a single security stack, or ecosystem, which is robust, flexible, and scalable.
Less is more
A single stack integrates everything and gives significantly increased visibility of the entire IT estate as well as lowering management overheads.
Some of the benefits of a ‘best-of-breed’ Microsoft stack include:
- Protection across endpoints, email, cloud, data, and identities
- Tools natively integrate with each other and Microsoft technology; and any other non-Microsoft data feeds can also be fed into sentinel
- Flexible controls and protections in Microsoft Defender to both protect you but enable operations
- Near real-time threat detection and response
- Ability to automate to reduce burden on teams
- Easily scalable cloud-based solutions
- Full visibility
- Increased detection.
However, these benefits won’t be reaped automatically. A consolidated stack will only save an organisation money and maximise returns if it is configured and used properly.
Microsoft Sentinel is a prime example. If an organisation simply pours all its data into it, they won’t get the most out of the tool. It’s much better to take a threat-led approach to bring in only what’s needed and utilise the full capabilities of the tool including automations.
Safety in numbers
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Security, Quorum Cyber defends and protects hundreds of organisations. So, we maintain in-depth product knowledge, and are responsible and accountable for always keeping up to date with the latest technologies and the ever-evolving threat landscape. What’s more, what we learn about handling the threats facing one customer, we can quickly apply to them all, to help our customers stay steps ahead of the cybercriminals.
Our role liberates customers to focus on their business needs, rather than being product experts. In turn, this maximises the security team’s effectiveness by allowing them to focus where it matters. We ensure optimisation of the security products and controls, maximised license usage, and ensure that should any attack get through, it can be reacted to effectively and tactically, whilst your business continues to thrive.
Why partner with a third party?
You still need experts to help you get the most out of those tools, but rather than trying to find lots of experts, each with their own knowledge of specific tools, you’ll be better off finding a small number who can master the consolidated stack.
Even with the strengths of a single security stack, organisations need to constantly keep up to speed with technology changes and threats. This is a mammoth task. So, it makes perfect sense to partner with a specialist cyber security company that employs experts who do all this day in, day out. What’s more, they observe and analyse trends across a large number of customers in different sectors, so they can quickly and efficiently apply the lessons from one to all the others, as appropriate to their technology and business needs.
The many benefits of a consolidated stack
Security aside, a consolidated stack offers organisations plenty of opportunities to manage their budget better, both with quick wins and long-term cost efficiency. It helps to improve operational efficiency and end user experience as the products seamlessly work together – making it easier for people to do their jobs.
In this way, by unifying security controls under the Microsoft ecosystem, reducing overall spend in licensing and management overheads, Quorum Cyber has typically reduced the total cost of security (TCO) by 30% of more. This huge saving as more than justified the decision to build a single security ecosystem.
We’ve helped many customers strengthen their security and manage their security finances better. As one of our customers, Head of IT Systems and Cyber Security at a leading housing association, said: “Thanks to our partnership with Quorum Cyber, we’ve built a single security ecosystem to reduce risk and safeguard 200,000 tenants, 2,000 employees and our business, all while lowering the total cost of ownership by 30% through replacing disparate security solutions and consolidating into the Microsoft security stack with the ingestion benefits this brings.”
Learn how to strengthen cyber security while optimising budget
You’re welcome to download Quorum Cyber’s free whitepaper, Mastering Cost Management and Reduction: A Guide for Chief Information Security Officers, to explore how to improve outcomes and results in any organisation in any sector.
Explore Quorum Cyber’s services
To learn more about the company’s cyber security and data security services, please visit the services section of the website, or contact us on 0333 444 0041 or via [email protected].
