SMEs overwhelmed and unprepared in the cyber abyss

The democ­ra­ti­sa­tion of sophis­ti­cat­ed cloud and col­lab­o­ra­tion tools has meant SMEs can com­pete glob­al­ly with major enter­pris­es which have much big­ger bud­gets. Where the large vari­a­tion in resources does clear­ly expose itself, how­ev­er, is in the area of cyber­se­cu­ri­ty.
If SMEs are com­pet­ing on an even keel with large enter­pris­es, it means they are also as much of a tar­get to cyber­crim­i­nals, or at least can be equal­ly affect­ed by vast sup­ply chain attacks, such as last year’s dev­as­tat­ing Solar­Winds hack. Yet they are nowhere near as able to com­mit the big sums required for the cut­ting-edge cyber tools that the ven­dor ecosys­tem claims they need.

This has left three-quar­ters of SMEs feel­ing they lack the capa­bil­i­ty and exper­tise to with­stand a cyber­se­cu­ri­ty attack, a recent study by Arc­tic Wolf found. The report under­lines the extent of the chal­lenge fac­ing SMEs, with 39% over­whelmed by the sheer vol­ume of secu­ri­ty alerts they receive. Many get up to 75 alerts a day, accord­ing to the research, lead­ing to ‘alert fatigue’.

“SMEs are in an uneven play­ing field,” says Ian McShane, field CTO at Arc­tic Wolf, a leader in secu­ri­ty oper­a­tions. “Not every­one has the mul­ti-mil­lion-pound bud­get to afford all of the lat­est cyber­se­cu­ri­ty tech­nol­o­gy. But these small­er organ­i­sa­tions are too often used as the embar­rass­ing case stud­ies by ven­dors. It’s frus­trat­ing when so called ‘lessons to be learned’ boil down to ‘don’t be like these idiots who could­n’t afford it’. Ven­dors have a lot to answer for here.

“There has been this mas­sive explo­sion in recent years in the sheer num­ber of buzz­words, tools, prod­ucts, plat­forms and secu­ri­ty ven­dors. The num­ber of solu­tions that com­pa­nies are being con­vinced they need to invest in is pret­ty incred­i­ble. If organ­i­sa­tions are using 10, 20, even 30 secu­ri­ty prod­ucts on aver­age then there are a whole lot of things that can go wrong.”

In the hype-fuelled cyber indus­try, it can often be for­got­ten that the threat land­scape can­not be dealt with by tech­nol­o­gy alone. Peo­ple and process are just as impor­tant, but this is also where the resource gap is exposed. Sim­ply find­ing time to man­age cyber­se­cu­ri­ty is a key prob­lem for many SMEs, the Arc­tic Wolf research dis­cov­ered, leav­ing them even more vul­ner­a­ble to attack.

Over half of the busi­ness lead­ers sur­veyed by Arc­tic Wolf admit­ted cyber­se­cu­ri­ty issues are reg­u­lar­ly depri­ori­tised in favour of oth­er busi­ness activ­i­ty, while 34% said they don’t have time to keep across every threat or alert. Those that fall vic­tim to cyber attacks not only suf­fer short-term finan­cial and oper­a­tional impacts, but also long-term impacts on trust and rep­u­ta­tion.

Even when com­pa­nies do have the resources to invest in peo­ple, they are met by a cyber­se­cu­ri­ty skills short­age. There were 3.12 mil­lion unfilled cyber­se­cu­ri­ty-relat­ed roles glob­al­ly last year, accord­ing to research by (ISC)². The short­age only exac­er­bates the resource gap even fur­ther, push­ing up the expect­ed salaries demand­ed by high­ly in-demand cyber tal­ent.

“This isn’t an indus­try that will be replaced by AI. Peo­ple and process play a huge role” says McShane. “The human ele­ment is crit­i­cal to get­ting cyber­se­cu­ri­ty right. If you don’t mea­sure it, it’s not man­aged. If you lack the tal­ent, whether through lack of invest­ment or avail­abil­i­ty, ulti­mate­ly you’re play­ing secu­ri­ty by chance instead of secu­ri­ty by choice. You’re hop­ing luck will pre­vail. Nobody wants to expe­ri­ence the huge cost and incon­ve­nience of a ran­somware attack.”

Through out­sourced secu­ri­ty oper­a­tions, Arc­tic Wolf helps thou­sands of com­pa­nies end cyber risk by iden­ti­fy­ing, respond­ing to and recov­er­ing from threats. The Arc­tic Wolf cloud-native plat­form is the industry’s only solu­tion that spans the com­plete secu­ri­ty oper­a­tions frame­work, includ­ing man­aged detec­tion and response (MDR), man­aged risk, man­aged cloud mon­i­tor­ing and man­aged secu­ri­ty aware­ness, deliv­ered by the indus­try’s orig­i­nal Concierge Secu­ri­ty Team.

Arc­tic Wolf is now expand­ing its oper­a­tions into the EMEA mar­ket, estab­lish­ing a Euro­pean head­quar­ters in the UK with fur­ther plans to open a Euro­pean Secu­ri­ty Oper­a­tions Cen­ter in Ger­many lat­er this year while grow­ing its pres­ence in the Nordics and the Benelux regions. The glob­al expan­sion comes after the com­pa­ny dou­bled its North Amer­i­can sales for an eighth con­sec­u­tive year and secured a fur­ther $150m Series F financ­ing round, valu­ing the busi­ness at $4.3bn.

“We’re bring­ing the exper­tise, knowl­edge and con­text to help organ­i­sa­tions do more with the peo­ple they have,” says McShane. “Impor­tant­ly, we’re not try­ing to replace peo­ple – we aug­ment what they do. And sim­i­lar­ly, we’re not try­ing to tell com­pa­nies they need to buy more tools, plat­forms or prod­ucts. All organ­i­sa­tions have, at their dis­pos­al right now, enough secu­ri­ty tools to improve their secu­ri­ty pos­ture, but they just need the assis­tance to be able to oper­a­tionalise it. Arc­tic Wolf does that oper­a­tional­i­sa­tion at scale, and at a speed which is orders of mag­ni­tude faster than com­pa­nies can do on their own, if indeed they can do it at all.”

That scale is part­ly deliv­ered via Arc­tic Wolf’s cloud-host­ed plat­form, which does most of the heavy-lift­ing analy­sis. But there is also the human ele­ment, remov­ing the worst ele­ments of cyber­se­cu­ri­ty from the company’s own­er­ship into Arc­tic Wolf’s own­er­ship. By embed­ding their exper­tise with­in busi­ness­es on a day-to-day basis, Arc­tic Wolf’s team under­stands not just the IT infra­struc­ture of its cus­tomers but exact­ly how their com­pa­ny works, giv­ing SMEs both the time and peace of mind to get on with run­ning their busi­ness. This elim­i­nates the bur­den of alert fatigue as well as dras­ti­cal­ly reduc­ing the impact of a cyber­se­cu­ri­ty inci­dent when it does occur.

“Ran­somware is just going to get worse, and over the next year or so it’s going to be a real wake-up call for almost every organ­i­sa­tion,” McShane adds. “Even if they are doing some­thing now, every com­pa­ny needs to do more. Secu­ri­ty isn’t some­thing that has a sil­ver bul­let. It’s not some­thing you can buy away. It’s an ongo­ing jour­ney; some­thing that needs con­tin­u­al invest­ment, mea­sure­ment and man­age­ment. We want to be that secu­ri­ty part­ner for as many cus­tomers as pos­si­ble and remove that unfair advan­tage that large organ­i­sa­tions with big bud­gets and 24/7 IT staff have. We want to bring those advanced capa­bil­i­ties to every­one.”

For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it www.arcticwolf.com/uk

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