Day to day IT will never go away, but strategic contribution and value add are the goals
It was so interesting catching up with Brad. Not only is he high-energy, he thinks of IT at the vision level. In fact, Brad was brought in to make IT more strategic. Sure the day to day responsibility of keeping computers and servers running, evolving more and more to virtualization, making sure ERP and CRM systems are trading the right information, etc. are central to the job. But, what could IT do to reduce configure, price and quote (CPQ) cycles from 45 days to minutes? By the way, they've done that.
Cybersecurity is in the way of being strategic
Here's the tradeoff. If you want IT to be a business partner, you've got to staff up and tool up in areas like security. It's unrealistic to expect IT to act strategically - in ways that impact revenue growth for less cost - if they are also saddled with sifting through millions of logs and alerts on a daily basis, hoping to find attack activity before it's too late. Magnaflux operations span nearly every continent - Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe, and Australia - the only exception being Antarctica. That's a lot of VPNS, VLANS, firewalls, and endpoints to keep an eye on.
Gradient Cyber MXDR takes the security load off of IT
Enter Gradient Cyber. Putting deep visibility on network, endpoint, cloud, and user activity - 24/7-is what we do. Security telemetry - the ocean of daily log and alert activity - is captured through network collection devices and APIs, fed into our Al-infused XDR platform, with prioritized and contextualized security hygiene and indication of compromise (IOC) incidents automatically presented in the platform UL. Our team of seasoned security analysts first review each incident - creating a human-in-the-loop (HITL) managed situation report (SitRep).
Second, where warranted, a response action is taken to either halt an attack in progress or mitigate the risk of one being progressed.
Freedom from alert fatigue, false positive chasing, incident analysis, reporting and response
The freedom from alert fatigue, false positive chasing, incident analysis, report writing and response invocation - all done by Gradient Cyber as a service - gives Magnaflux the peace of mind that someone has devoted and experienced eyes on their IT infrastructure around the clock.
That, in and of itself, provides a significant cost savings to Magnaflux. The alternative would be to take this work in-house. By Brad's estimation, "that would require two additional IT headcount, and on the order of $100,000 budget for hardware and software and other things like Al that I'd have to start dabbling with. And that's a distraction."
The key word there is 'distraction'. From a security perspective, Brad's number one concern is intellectual property (IP) loss. That would not be a distraction. That could be catastrophic. For Magnaflux, non-destructive testing involves highly-specialized and proprietary chemical formulations for metallurgical integrity testing. Having that exfiltrated via a nation-state attack would be a calamity. But if an MXDR service can detect and respond to early kill-chain activity, then Brad and his team are freed to work on higher value, revenue generating, cost saving activity.
And, we all want to trust that airplane engines are well-tested.
