Today’s security teams face challenges related to complexity and consistency, especially as the implementation of point products creates silos in an organisation’s IT environment, ultimately leading to inefficient handling of cyber threats.  Additionally, as threats become increasingly numerous, persistent, and sophisticated, manual alert triage is no longer sufficient; instead, contextualising all data points into a single action thread is vital to enable comprehensive defence against threats.
Against this backdrop, organisations in the Middle East have realised that investing in multiple security tools without any integration leads to an ineffective fragmented defence framework with continuously increasing operational costs. Hence, businesses have begun prioritising automation and consolidation of their cybersecurity estates, leveraging platform/mesh value propositions from leading cybersecurity vendors, as stated in Help AG’s State of the Market Report 2023.
This integrated approach to cyber defence is one of the technology trends that will dominate in coming years, as Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) in the region strive to deliver cybersecurity services that unify various cybersecurity services, enhancing customer experience and visibility, enabling security teams to protect assets and ultimately eradicating threats as they arise.
Help AG UNIFY
Being a pioneer in the Middle East cybersecurity industry once more, Help AG is leading the shift towards Integrated Cyber Defence with the launch of Help AG UNIFY – the first consolidated platform unifying the pivotal capabilities of visibility, collaboration, orchestration, and automation across all cyber defence services. As a foundation for all of Help AG’s cyber defence service offerings, UNIFY brings together the best of people, processes and technologies through a next-generation platform delivering consistent, high-quality services and seamless customer experience.
The power of UNIFY is embedded within Help AG’s Managed Detection & Response (MDR) subscription, and customers enjoy market leading capabilities as a standard offering. The vendor-agnostic platform integrates third-party data and products, supports dedicated customer environments, including multi-cloud and hybrid environments, and delivered in-country, ensuring compliance with local data regulations.
Another key capability offered by UNIFY is embedded automation, as the platform deploys multiple automation playbooks to ensure consistent service quality and improved efficiency in operations. Moreover, UNIFY provides orchestration to create workflows which enable interoperability between different services.
The platform leverages these capabilities of embedded automation and orchestration for intelligent analysis, automating repetitive tasks like enrichment to deliver quicker and consistent analysis, while allowing cyber analysts to focus on more demanding activities. This is particularly important as the cybersecurity industry faces a global skills shortage, making it vital to efficiently utilise the time and talents of experts.
Detection – Fast, efficient, automated
Diving into the ‘detection’ aspect of MDR, an integrated approach to cyber resilience facilitates faster and more efficient threat detection by offering security teams enhanced, seamless visibility across IT and OT environments. Additionally, with an Integrated Cyber Defence Platform such as Help AG’s UNIFY, customers can benefit from next-generation visualisation and analytics capabilities to enhance functionality across services.
Integrated cyber defence also allows for threat content development from various sources, including intelligence teams, Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) services, red teaming services, and Security Operations Center (SOC) operations.
Moreover, this approach improves detection fidelity by reducing false positives, helps security teams identify blind spots, and facilitates proactive threat hunting.
UNIFY offers comprehensive 360-degree visibility, enabling seamless collaboration among customers, engineers, SOC analysts, and our IR team. Finally, an integrated approach enables context-aware threat detection by providing a better understanding of the specific use case or context in which a system operates – such as the types of applications, user behaviors, network configurations, and system dependencies. This enhances security by tailoring detection mechanisms to specific use cases, thus improving the ability to identify and respond to potential threats more effectively.
Response – timely, consistent, intelligent
By tying together different security solutions and tools under one vendor-agnostic platform, Integrated Cyber Defence offers timely, consistent, and intelligent response to threats.
Timely response focuses on how quickly actions are taken to resolve an alert. Help AG UNIFY acts on 80% more telemetry than is possible manually in order to stop threats early in the attack lifecycle, improving vital metrics like Mean Time to Respond (MTTR).
Meanwhile, consistent response focuses on the quality and uniformity of actions taken. Orchestration and automation help avoid human handling errors, whereas quality checking provides attestation that the responses were correct and met expectations.
Our AI-driven automation engine harnesses the power of machine learning to drive automation and intelligent decision-making, enhancing threat detection, streamlining investigations, and optimising response actions. Finally, intelligent response focuses on the depth and breadth of incident response services. When alerts and related data are being assessed at machine speed, skilled analysts can gather evidence and relevant security event context proactively, allowing for improved investigation, faster decision-making, and even breach prevention.
In a nutshell
Integrated Cyber Defence is vital for accelerating incident detection and response in the face of a growing attack surface and resolving security alerts proactively – all while streamlining customer experiences and reducing complexity in modern security environments. By partnering with the right MSSP, customers can tap into timely, intelligent, and consistent threat detection and response on a next-generation platform that unifies cybersecurity capabilities behind a single pane of glass.
