When it Comes to Cybersecurity and Compliance, there is no Room for Error

• By Jeremy Rasmussen
• Mar 01, 2021

We’ve seen the statistics about the sharp rise in cyber attacks, and the impact on businesses – lost revenue, stress on resources. In many cases, organizations never recover. In fact, 60 percent of small companies go out of business within six months after falling victim to a data breach or cyber attack.

When you consider the volume of threats and attacks, most of which go undetected, and the constantly changing regulatory environment across industries, it’s no wonder businesses have a tough time keeping up. But with financial security and future of your business on the line, organizations of all sizes must be proactive about putting measures in place to monitor suspicious activity.

Having basic security protection solutions and practices in place isn’t enough. In this age of technological awareness, many business owners believe that paying for security tools is enough to deflect cyberattacks. It’s not. According to a recent report, despite deploying several security products, 53% of attacks remained undetected.

To counter the daily threats and long-term impact of cybersecurity and compliance issues, businesses need to take concrete steps to stay ahead of hackers and to avoid compliance backlash. Doing so can be costly, complex and difficult to manage if done piecemeal. The average small and mid-size business (SMB) has ten or more security solutions in place.

Other challenges facing SMBs around cybersecurity include:

Lack of resources: SMBs have already made investments in technology and may be reluctant to spend more on something that requires updating operating system, storage, or the whole infrastructure.

Lack of expertise: Attacks are becoming more complex. Organizations need to deploy security solutions that extend to remote locations and cover roaming and mobile users. SMBs also have partners,consultants, supply chains and third party apps that extend beyond the traditional network perimeter and make things harder to defend. What’s more, an ongoing shortage of experienced cybersecurity staff worldwide makes finding and hiring staff difficult.

Lack of information and training: Most small and medium-sized businesses do not have a sizable enough IT team to apply the necessary focus on daily threats, attacks and compliance challenges.

Lack of time: Smaller businesses are understandably focused on day to day operations, such as product or service delivery, serving customers, and growing revenue. Cybersecurity and compliance requirements can seem like a non-urgent priority.

All of these factors have created the need for a new approach to cybersecurity and compliance.

Businesses must predict and prevent modern, sophisticated cyber threats – while also ensuring compliance with growing regulatory mandates.

To help SMBs take a proactive approach, we’ve seen the emergence of a new category, Managed Cybersecurity and Compliance Provider (MCCP). MCCP organizations offer a full range of cybersecurity protection and remediation services, along with complete compliance achievement and monitoring, to keep clients secure, compliant and focused on growth.

As one of the pioneers of MCCP, Abacode drives dramatic improvements in threat detection and protection, while bringing new-found visibility into regulatory compliance requirements -without the complexity or cost of multiple suppliers. Abacode’s deep expertise in complicated regulatory environments in industries like healthcare, financial services and the public sector ensures clients are up-to-date and compliant at all times to simplify audits, avoid fines, and support access to new revenue opportunities.

Abacode has spent years working with clients to understand their challenges. From those learnings, the company now delivers a complete cybersecurity and compliance solution for better accountability and visibility across the security landscape. The combination of software-driven security solutions and compliance expertise enables Abacode to provide SMBs with cybersecurity and compliance in one managed service, called MCCP Core.

Abacode’s all-in-one solution includes:

Managed Threat Detection - 91% of cyberattacks don’t trigger security alerts. Abacode combines leading Security Information & Event Management (SIEM) and AI Threat Detection software with its dual redundant, 24/7 Security Operations Centers (SOC) for real-time visibility across your entire threat landscape.

Assessment and Advisory - Delivers a true vulnerability assessment: Gap identification, a report card on business impacts and remediation strategies.

Digital Forensics and Incident Response - Leverage threat intelligence data enriched with years of cyberattack and threat experience to manage the preparation, response and mitigation of attacks such as phishing, ransomware, or credentials theft when they occur.

Managed Compliance - A recent study shows that it costs an organization twice as much to not comply with regulatory mandates versus making the initial investment. Abacode ensures that organizations abide by regulation requirements and/or certification bodies (CB) in preparation for audits against security standards such as CMMC, HIPAA, FedRAMP, NIST, and SOC 2. Abacode manages the entire process and acts as their customers' security department during assessment, audit, examination, or certification processes.

SMBs simply can’t afford to wait until a crisis happens to take action. By working with a MCCP, the critical business requirements of cybersecurity and compliance can be outsourced - usually for less cost and at greater effectiveness than in house - providing full confidence to keep focus on core operations and growth while remaining secure and compliant.