Surely, the human excellence stems from a host of different factors, but more importantly than the rest, it stems from our ability of improving at a consistent pace. We say this because the stated ability has already fetched the world some huge milestones, with technology appearing as a rather unique member of the group. The reason why technology’s credentials are so anomalous is purposed around its skill-set, which was unprecedented enough to realize all the possibilities for us that we couldn’t have imagined otherwise. Nevertheless, a closer look should be able to reveal how the whole runner was also very much inspired by the way we applied those skills across a real world environment. The latter component was, in fact, what gave the creation a spectrum-wide presence and made it the ultimate centerpiece of every horizon. Now, having such a powerful tool run the show did expand our experience in many different directions, but even after reaching so far ahead, this prodigious concept called technology will somehow keep on delivering the right goods. The same has grown to become a lot more evident in recent times, and assuming one new GRC-themed development pans out just like we envision, it will only propel that trend towards greater heights over the near future and beyond.
Critical Start, a leading provider of Managed Detection and Response (MDR) cybersecurity solutions and pioneer of Managed Cyber Risk Reduction (MCRR), has officially announced a wider availability of its Asset Visibility offering. To give you some context, the stated offering is designed to help you become more proactive within your security program, meaning it lets you uncover assets that need protection, validate that the expected endpoint security controls are in place and functional, and identify areas of risk exposure due to gaps in security coverage. Talk about the product on a slightly deeper level, when packed in as a standard with Critical Start’s general MDR setup, Asset Visibility brings to the fore an Asset Inventory feature, which enables the user to build normalized inventory from their security and asset data sources so to conceive a consolidated view of assets across the entire IT estate. Next up, we referred to how the solution helps us identify gaps in security coverage, the idea with this one is to spot previously unknown or unmanaged assets, and therefore, make it possible for a user to mitigate any potential security gap in time. Such a mechanism also cuts back on the possibility that a forthcoming threat will skip past the usual inspections. Then, we have Asset criticality ratings where assets are basically tagged based on their importance to operations and data sensitivity. Like you can guess, this goes a long way when the agenda is to segregate the picture into a more digestible form, thus allowing the user to prioritize remediation actions against greatest impact to risk. Moving on to a unified host inventory, it works with the data from asset inventory to manufacture a single source of truth for all assets. Owing to the given facet, users should be able to eliminate the need of a manual manual tracking process like Excel.
“An MDR service with contractual SLAs is foundational to any organization detecting and responding to current threats and attacks. Increasingly, our customers have asked for a way to become more proactive in their approach to cybersecurity, and we have responded! We now offer a portfolio of MCRR services, which includes Asset Visibility—an important first step to risk reduction. It helps our customers understand the assets in their environment and if they are protected,” said Chris Carlson, Chief Product Officer at Critical Start.
Hold on, we still have a few bits left to unpack, considering we still haven’t discussed the solution’s data administration and management skill. Here, Critical Start’s Asset Visibility product delivers at your disposal in-depth analysis and exclusion, reporting and exports, de-duplication and exclusion, end-of-life OS identification, trend analysis, search and filter capabilities, and Configuration Management Database (CMDB) augmentation via export. Now, when you put forth a comprehensive feature assortment of this sort, you empower security teams big time in their pursuit of keeping pace with business changes and controlling their cyber risk exposure accordingly. Rounding up the highlights are these self-service integrations that are in place to let customers integrate and configure new products whenever they are needed. Such flexibility leverages increased context to generate broader asset visibility and coverage gap information for continuous cyber risk reduction. By achieving that reduction, it facilitates a rapid time-to-value reality.
The development brings a rather interesting follow-up to all the challenges faced by businesses in and around managing cyber risk, maximizing current technology, and optimizing costs. You see, the same is reflected in Critical Start’s 2023 Cyber Risk Landscape Peer Report, which revealed that nearly 90% of organizations lack the time to continuously monitor security posture and identify potential areas of control failure, a factor that greatly hampers their ability to understand the real level of risk exposure.
Founded in 2012, Critical Start’s rise comes on the back of its bid to provide industry’s first Managed Cyber Risk Reduction solution. To get there, the company clubbed together ingredients like holistic cyber risk monitoring, a human-led risk and security operations team, and experience worth over 8 years in conceiving award-winning Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services. At present, Critical Start helps its customers access maturity assessments, peer benchmarking, posture and event analytics, response capabilities, and more.
“We’ve added more value to our MDR offering by including proactive capabilities like Endpoint Security Coverage Gaps at no extra cost while giving customers needing enhanced visibility and management the option to add Asset Visibility services to their security program, all while remaining within the Critical Start ecosystem,” said Carlson.