Cyber incidents are on the rise, according to recent government data, reflecting the challenge businesses face in defending themselves from evolving threats. This is opening up opportunities for IT channel partners to take a more proactive approach with platform-based cyber risk exposure management, adding fresh customer value with a highly profitable offering.
The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) received over 36,700 calls via its Australian Cyber Security Hotline during FY2023-24, an increase of 12% from the previous financial year. Not only are cyber incidents on the rise, the average cost of such incidents to large businesses is sitting at $63,600, meaning companies are increasingly conscious of managing their exposure to cyber risks.
The growing need for cyber risk exposure management is having a knock-on effect for the IT channel, which is in a prime position to bolster their customers’ security posture through a best-in-class cyber risk exposure management service. This is increasingly achieved through a platform-based approach for complete coverage and the scope to offer additional services.
Challenges to managing risk
Getting a handle on exposure to cyber risks can be a tricky matter for a lot of organisations, especially if they don’t have a dedicated internal cyber security team — and often even if they do. Perhaps one of the primary challenges is the fluidity of the threat landscape and the nature of business today, with its increasingly connected systems.
The more connected, internet-facing systems we have, the greater and more complex the potential attack surface for businesses of all sizes — and particularly for large enterprises. This makes it difficult to identify all the digital assets and potential vulnerabilities that may be present in the extended corporate network.
Most organisations have multiple business systems, each with their own data, integrations and connected elements. This makes it hard to gain full visibility across the organisation of all the potential attack vectors cyber criminals may exploit, meaning that accurately assessing and communicating risk is not a straightforward matter.
Moreover, traditional security approaches are often reactive and fail to address the need for proactive defence techniques against modern threats. Likewise, the persistence of manual processes in the identification, assessment and mitigation of cyber risks can be time-consuming and prone to errors. This can impact how well businesses can manage their exposure to risk.
A unified force to fight back
For IT service providers, attempting to fight the risks and overcome such challenges using traditional tools and approaches can simply compound the issues that organisations are trying to solve in their quest to manage risk more effectively. However, a platform-based approach has the power to unify the visibility needed to manage risk proactively across the organisation.
Being able to see everything means businesses and their partners stand a better chance at securing everything. A piecemeal approach made up of individual point solutions is typically unable to capture a single view of the entire business and its connected systems. But with an end-to-end cyber security platform on the job, blind spots are eliminated.
Not only does a platform-based approach help to expose potential threats through greater visibility, it also opens the door for partners to gain access to multiple capabilities such as external attack surface management (EASM), cloud security posture management (CSPM) and cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM), all from within the one solution.
Access to the multitude of tools a single platform-based solution ecosystem has the potential to bring additional value to customer engagements through extended services. It also helps to reduce the complexity and tool sprawl that arises as a result of several single-issue solutions working together, even when deployed in a relatively coordinated manner.
Single vision for valuable defences
The value-add that such platforms offer partners and their customers can be seen in solutions such as Trend Vision One™ for Service Providers (xSP), which gives xSPs the power of Trend Micro’s integrated platform in one package. Most importantly, a platform like Trend Vision One offers service providers the ability to gain a single view of their customers’ business.
That unified view is key to enabling a proactive approach to cyber risk exposure management by enabling a range of services such as attack surface discovery, cloud asset inventory, identity posture, risk assessment and prioritisation and compliance management — all backed up by a platform-wide dashboard and reporting tools that provide deep company-wide visibility.
Such visibility enables service providers to discover all of their customers’ assets, including devices, accounts, applications, cloud assets, shadow AI and more. It also lets them leverage Trend Micro’s native sensors and use third-party sources to build a complete view of the attack surface, turning insights into AI-driven recommendations and automated playbooks for high-margin, proactive security.
Further, a platform approach in partnership with Trend Micro Vision One gives IT providers the ability to reduce costs by up to 67% and extend partner services by leveraging the full range of built-in tools and vendor expertise via the platform, delivering world-class tools and skills to enable proactive and predictive security outcomes seamlessly across their customer base.
Against a threat landscape in which a cyber security incident is only a matter of ‘when,’ not ‘if,’ a platform-based approach to cyber risk exposure management offers a critical toolkit to safeguard enterprises and a valuable lever for service providers to tap into an ecosystem that supports a full range of services to help manage their customers’ risk and keep them secure.
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