Cybersecurity and compliance are now essential pillars within the modern enterprise. They are integral to the business continuity and legal responsibility of every organization, large or small. What’s more, these obligations are exponentially more complex than they were just 5 years ago. However, since these are relatively new obligations that means finding the best vendors and understanding the right services for your company can be uncharted territory for your team. With this in mind, the team at the IT Security Guru has compiled a comprehensive list of the industry-leading solutions that every company needs for a well-rounded and robust cybersecurity and compliance program.
First, we will help you make sense of the complicated web of cybersecurity solutions. Shown below in ‘figure 1’, are the many intertwined and interwoven cybersecurity services and vendors. It’s likely that not all of these will be relevant to every business, so it’s crucial for you to develop an understanding of which vendor would be most appropriate for your company/industry before beginning the buying process. What follows is a list of IT Security Guru’s ‘best in class’ recommendations for cybersecurity purchasing in 2022, based on our extensive industry knowledge, research, and comparative analysis, based on value for money and convenience, we selected the best vendors with the best products and services for every industry.
“Best in Class” 2022
Cybersecurity & Compliance Services: Cerberus Sentinel
When it comes to protecting your company against cyber-attacks and ensuring regulatory compliance it’s best to look at these obligations in aggregate rather than separately. They are so heavily codependent that it just makes your life easier if they are approached this way. However, it is nearly impossible to handle them this way since they are typically handled by a constellation of service providers. This multi-vendor approach, while common practice today, is far too complicated to be considered a ‘best in class’ solution. For this reason, we have selected Cerberus Sentinel as the ‘Best in Class’ provider for their holistic approach to Cybersecurity and Compliance Services. They are pioneering an end-to-end offering that provides both services from one company. The secret to their success is that their services are delivered by dedicated teams of experts for each program who work collaboratively to solve your cybersecurity and compliance needs.
“Cerberus Sentinel is different from other companies in this industry, our employees are not consultants, they are dedicated partners available to our clients on a recurring monthly contract. Due to the numerous challenges in hiring experienced cybersecurity and compliance professionals, assimilating our team of industry and subject matter experts into our client’s team is the ideal solution.”
– David Jemmett, CEO, Cerberus Sentinel
About Cerberus Sentinel
“Cybersecurity is a culture, not a product” this is the Cerberus Sentinel mantra. They were founded on the belief that service providers should be technology and product agnostic and that the best approach to cybersecurity and compliance is one of proactive prevention accomplished through the development of a culture of awareness. In an era when ‘add another tool to the stack’ is the prevailing recommendation, their approach is relatively new, however, it doesn’t ignore the importance of technical tools, rather Cerberus Sentinel offers solutions that go beyond the tools, working to build a deeply rooted solution at the heart of your organization; your people.
What does it mean to be technology agnostic? While most cybersecurity firms are locked into working with a single technology, Cerberus Sentinel has differentiated themselves by remaining technology agnostic. This approach enables their teams to work with any business, no matter what systems or tools they use. For their customers, the benefit is equally valuable; they’re able to choose the best tools and technology for their business needs without affecting their relationship with the team at Cerberus Sentinel.
Cerberus Sentinel Solutions
Cerberus Sentinel solutions cover the full range of cybersecurity and compliance services enabling them to deliver the holistic approach that so many companies need today. They call this unique approach MCCP+ which stands for Managed Compliance and Cybersecurity Provider + Culture. This is the only holistic solution that provides all three of these elements under one roof from a dedicated team of subject matter experts.
Cerberus Sentinel offers the following solutions:
Secured Managed Services, Compliance Services, SOC Services, Virtual CISO Services, Incident Response, Certified Forensics, Assessment Services, and Cybersecurity & Compliance Training.
- Secured Managed Services: Competing cybersecurity companies may be able to point out vulnerabilities or configuration issues, but Cerberus Sentinel has experts with the capability to fix them, as well as to manage the subsequent IT infrastructure which may be put in place.
- Compliance: As an authorized FedRAMP vendor Cerberus Sentinel an insider’s perspective to the process in a variety of industry standards, including FedRAMP, FISMA 2014, HIPAA and NIST.
- SOC Services: They offer SOC-as-a-service, a subscription-based service that manages and monitors client’s logs, devices, clouds, network and assets for possible cyber threats. This service provides Cerberus clients with the knowledge and skills necessary to combat cybersecurity threats without the strain on internal teams.
- Virtual CISO Service: Corporations are in need of cybersecurity services but do not have the capital resources or knowledge base to hire a dedicated in-house Chief Information Security Officer (“CISO”). They offer this service to companies on an ongoing managed service basis as a resource to augment their management team. CISO-as-a-service includes road mapping future policy frameworks for clients and providing knowledgeable expertise to help them achieve their security needs.
- Incident Response and Forensics: Focusing on identification, investigation, and remediation of cyberattacks.
- Assessment Services: Cerberus Sentinel specializes in advanced cyber security assessments that highlight the skills and experience of the Cerberus team’s top-tier talent. Cerberus customers love them because they routinely identify issues that no one else does due to the emphasis on real-world manual testing techniques, and custom exploit development to uncover new avenues of attack.
- Cybersecurity & Compliance Training: This targets the root cause for 75% of cyber breach events by starting with a culture of security-first forward thinking. Cerberus Sentinel’s security awareness training can prevent a catastrophic cyberattack before it even occurs by equipping users with the tools and techniques required to spot a potential cyberattack in the early stages.
Guru’s conclusion: A holistic, cultural approach to security purpose built for our age, the Cerberus Sentinel team and offerings provide their customers and partners with an approach to cybersecurity which is both holistic and tailored to the specific buying needs of organizations in security and compliance. Their consultative approach means that they are able to support and engage with customers all through the process, guiding organizations through the buying process, through implementation, to eventually becoming full-embedded and trusted partners, who can take on the day-to-day security and compliance functions of an organization indefinitely.
Their wide-ranging offering means an ability to slim down an overly complex vendor stack, and effectively outsource whole departments to a trusted, expert provider. In the current climate of financial uncertainty and talent shortages, working with a consultative, technology agnostic vendor allows for a certainty in your security posture, which can allow internal and compliance teams the confidence to operate effectively, and can provide your C-Suite with the reassurance they need that security is being purchased strategically.
This kind of holistic offering could not be better timed to ensure businesses are able to operate securely; and indeed, to operate at all. Cyber insurance premiums have risen by a third over the course of the last year, as ransomware and other security incidents have put a huge squeeze on the viability of existing cyber-insurance policies. Having a certified external organisation such as Cerberus who can complete a rigorous security audit, which can be presented back to insurers as proof of a robust, overarching approach to cybersecurity can work to back up any claims made to your insurers, reducing premiums in the process – Good news for both the underwriters and the companies in question.
To learn more about Cerberus Sentinel or to schedule a meeting with their sales team, visit www.CerberusSentinel.com
“Honorable mentions” 2022
KnowBe4
About KnowBe4
KnowBe4, the provider of the world’s largest security awareness training and simulated phishing platform, is used by more than 41,000 organizations around the globe. Founded by IT and data security specialist, Stu Sjouwerman, KnowBe4 helps organizations address the human element of security by raising awareness about ransomware, CEO fraud, and other social engineering tactics through a new-school approach to awareness training on security. Kevin Mitnick, an internationally recognized cybersecurity specialist and KnowBe4’s Chief Hacking Officer, helped design the KnowBe4 training based on his well-documented social engineering tactics. Tens of thousands of organizations rely on KnowBe4 to mobilize their end users as their last line of defense.
KnowBe4’s Mission
KnowBe4 enables your employees to make smarter security decisions, every day through various Enterprise Security Awareness Training activities:
Specific Offerings:
KnowBe4 provides baseline testing to assess the Phish-prone percentage of your users through a simulated phishing, vishing or smishing attack. KnowBe4 boasts the world’s largest library of security awareness training content, including interactive modules, videos, games, posters and newsletters. Automated training campaigns with scheduled reminder emails. The KnowBe4 user phishing training offers best-in-class, fully automated simulated phishing, vishing and smishing attacks, thousands of templates with unlimited usage, and community phishing templates. Complete with enterprise-strength reporting, both high-level and granular stats and graphs ready for management reports. KnowBe4 even has a personal timeline for each user.
Manage and Automate Compliance and Audit Cycles, reduce the time you need to satisfy requirements to meet compliance goals with pre-built requirements templates for the most widely used regulations. Centralize Policy Distribution and Tracking. Save time when you manage distribution of policies and track attestation through campaigns. Identify, Respond, and Monitor Your Risk. Simplify risk initiatives with an easy-to-use wizard with risk workflow based on the well-recognized NIST 800-30.
Compliance training typically once a year is far from enough to train your users effectively or reinforce the important legal and regulatory requirements your organization needs to address for compliance. With a constant cadence of always fresh, up-to-date and short content from KnowBe4, you can stay on top of current compliance requirements and deliver a variety of training campaigns to your users on a monthly or quarterly basis.
One Identity
With the proliferation of human and machine identities, the race to the cloud and the rise of remote working, protecting identity has never been more important. The key impediment to doing so is the fragmented way in which most organizations manage access rights. One Identity brings together the four core elements of identity security – Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), Identity and Access Management (IAM), Privileged Access Management (PAM), and Active Directory Management and Security (ADMS) – to help customers holistically address this challenge. We call this unified identity security
Moving from a fragmented state to a unified approach to identity security delivers numerous operational benefits, such as correlating all identities, removing friction between formerly distinct technologies, and facilitating automation and orchestration. This model also provides a critical level of added protection. With 360-degree visibility, adaptive security controls, and the ability to apply analytics across all identities in the enterprise, organizations can verify everything before granting access to their most-critical assets. This level of response and control allows cybersecurity executives to shrink windows of exposure, move closer to achieving Zero Trust and improve their overall security posture.
The One Identity Offering:
One Identity’s vision is not to simply help customers solve all their identity security problems with fragmented point solutions. They believe there is significant value in integrating these technologies into a single, cloud-first platform – what One Identitycall the Unified Identity Security Platform.
The foundation of One Identity’s platform is in an identity-correlation system that delivers a consistent view across users, machine identities and accounts to help organizations move from a fragmented to a unified state. Workflow orchestration eliminates manual and error-prone activities; connectors deliver flexibility by bringing disparate applications and security ecosystems under a single point of control. Powering all of this is identity intelligence and analytics to help cybersecurity professionals get a clear view of their risk profile and take corrective actions as needed.
Key Offerings:
- Identity Governance and Administration: Complete, business-driven governance for identity, data and privileged permissions
- Identity and Access Management: Secure workforce, partners, and customers while increasing operational efficiency and accelerating digital transformation efforts
- Privileged Access Management: Protect privileged accounts and enable identity-centric Zero Trust for just-in-time access
- Active Directory Management and Security: Enhance management of Active Directory/Azure AD for efficiency, security and to achieve Zero Trust
Synopsys
Moving from a fragmented state to a unified approach to identity security delivers numerous operational benefits, such as correlating all identities, removing friction between formerly distinct technologies, and facilitating automation and orchestration. This model also provides a critical level of added protection. With 360-degree visibility, adaptive security controls, and the ability to apply analytics across all identities in the enterprise, organizations can verify everything before granting access to their most-critical assets. This level of response and control allows cybersecurity executives to shrink windows of exposure, move closer to achieving Zero Trust and improve their overall security posture.
“From Silicon to Software” is the mantra at the heart of Synopsys. The team works to provide innovations that are changing the way we work and play. Autonomous vehicles. Artificial intelligence. The cloud. 5G. These breakthroughs are ushering in the era of Smart Everything―where devices are getting smarter, everything’s connected, and everything must be secure. Powering this new era of digital innovation are advanced silicon chips and exponentially growing amounts of software content―all working together, smartly and securely. Synopsys is at the forefront of Smart Everything with the world’s most advanced technologies for chip design and verification, IP integration, and software security and quality testing. We help our customers innovate from silicon to software so they can deliver Smart Everything. The three strands of this are represented via a mission statement to:
- Build The Best Chips, Faster: Synopsys is the world’s leading provider of solutions for designing and verifying advanced silicon chips, and for designing the next-generation processes and models required to manufacture those chips.
- Integrate More Capabilities, Faster: Synopsys offers the world’s broadest portfolio of silicon IP―pre-designed blocks of logic, memory, interfaces, analog, security, and embedded processors―to help our customers introduce more capabilities and reduce integration risk.
- Build Secure Software, Faster: Synopsys helps customers build security and quality into the DNA of their software code―at any stage of the software development lifecycle and across the supply chain―to minimize risks while maximizing speed of application development
Selection of specific offerings:
Coverity Static Application Security Testing: This compliance standard gives you the speed, ease of use, accuracy, industry standards compliance, and scalability that you need to develop high-quality, secure applications. Coverity identifies critical software quality defects and security vulnerabilities in code as it’s written, early in the development process when it’s least costly and easiest to fix.
Precise actionable remediation advice and context-specific eLearning help your developers understand how to fix their prioritized issues quickly, without having to become security experts. Coverity seamlessly integrates automated security testing into your CI/CD pipelines and supports your existing development tools and workflows. Choose where and how to do your development: on-premises or in the cloud with the Polaris Software Integrity Platform™ (SaaS), a highly scalable, cloud-based application security platform. Coverity supports 22 languages and over 70 frameworks and templates.
Seeker: Interactive Application Security Testing , gives you unparalleled visibility into your web app security posture and identifies vulnerability trends against compliance standards (e.g., OWASP Top 10, PCI DSS, GDPR, CAPEC, and CWE/SANS Top 25). Seeker enables security teams to identify and track sensitive data to ensure that it is handled securely and not stored in log files or databases with weak or no encryption. Seeker’s seamless integration into CI/CD workflows enables fast interactive application security testing at DevOps speed. Unlike other IAST solutions, which only identify security vulnerabilities, Seeker can also determine whether a security vulnerability (e.g., XSS or SQL injection) can be exploited, thus providing developers with a risk-prioritized list of verified vulnerabilities to fix in their code immediately.
Black Duck Binary Analysis is a software composition analysis (SCA) solution to help you manage the ongoing risks associated with a complex, modern software supply chain. Empower procurement, operations, and development teams with visibility and insight into the composition of commercial applications, vendor-supplied binaries, and other third-party software.
Black Duck Binary Analysis quickly generates a complete software bill of materials (BOM), which tracks third-party and open source components, and identifies known security vulnerabilities, associated licenses, and code quality risks. Because Black Duck Binary Analysis analyzes binary code, as opposed to source code, it can scan virtually any software, including desktop and mobile applications, embedded system firmware, and more.
