On-going solutions, rather than a once off product.
Having been the “IT Guy” and the poor fool who has to convince businesses to spend their scarce budget allocation on security for over two decades. It has been an uphill battle educating businesses around the dangers from lack of security when it would have been easier to resort to scare tactics.
At OpusV, we believe that anything in the IT space should add tangible value to the business of a client, this means that we avoid recommending or selling “solutions” that are advertised as “turnkey ready” which are more often that not, driven by resellers trying to put an expensive piece of hardware at the client’s site.
As cloud native infrastructure becomes increasingly common in business environments, we are starting to recommend that clients avoid purchasing expensive on-site metal appliances, except for when absolutely necessary. Instead, our focus is on a dispersed and in-depth security solution, where integration with a single point of network visibility is implemented. No longer relying on a firewall appliance as the singular point of security, we focus on distributing aspects of security throughout all points in the network.
By implementing endpoint detection, network detection, behavioural analytics (of both user actions and network traffic), log centralisation and intelligent analysis to all the parts of an on-premise, or datacentre colocation, or even to hyperscale cloud environments, our clients receivean integrated, holistic and compliant solution that on expensive singular “out of the box” product simply cannot provide.
It is interesting to see informed competitors try to “sell a box”, without understanding that the requirements of critical infrastructure compliance, requires a whole of company approach.
If you don’t integrate the “people systems” with the OT parts of your network and if your policies and procedures are not adapted to a security minded approach to all aspects of operation, then you are only doing the barest of window dressing, while your increasingly insecure OT network suffers behind you.
So OpusV has been taking a “systems approach”. We don’t just sell a product, we sit down with business managers, and operational staff, and adapt the security requirements, with our own suite of experienced solutions, and most importantly, the customers normal day to day business operations, and make something that is truly on the pathway to a secure operations stance, without introducing significant frictions to the business.
As a specific example, in the last few power plants we have been involved in building, we have implemented our IXID identity systems which tie into every switch, RTU and SCADA control server, but also integrated all of the logging of these systems (and more!) into our SIEM product, and then connected probes to every port in the network to our Network Visibility dashboard.
Not one system, but a dispersed implementation, at every point that provides you with all the security practices you need for critical infrastructure compliance!
