Protect Your Business by Predicting, Preventing and Detecting Cyber Threats

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The word Protect and a padlock iconMy last posts have explored the first three Dell Services imperatives that drive our work for our customers – Transform, Connect, and Inform. Now, we’ll explore our final imperative: Protect.

Why Protect?

As IT managers and business executives know too well, unless you proactively protect your business by predicting, preventing and detecting cyber threats, you’re at risk every moment of every day. Dell Services can help make your business into a virtual fortress, and it can help you recover quickly if you are attacked.

You see it in the news all the time: some variation on the themes of cybercrime, whether it’s an attack that compromises customer data or a virus or malware that shuts down a company’s entire operations. Last year alone, 174 million records were compromised. A typical security breach costs about $5.4 million.

And don’t think that the damage is only monetary – when a company is attacked, costs can also add up in terms of damage to the company’s reputation and brand, loss of intellectual property and crippling of operations.

A big part of the problem is that 85 percent of cyber-attacks go undiscovered for weeks, and the longer an attack goes undiscovered, the greater the damage.

For example, our partnership with Ameren, a large U.S. electric and gas company, illustrates just how aggressive we are when it comes to protecting our customers, and how utilizing our expertise also saved the company money.

Federal mandates require that utility companies have very tight information security, partly to prevent rolling blackouts such as those that plagued the Eastern U.S. in 2003. Ameren needed to upgrade its security to keep up with compliance demands while simultaneously managing the complexity switching security providers, minimizing any gaps in protection. Ameren turned to Dell Services, recognizing that only Dell had the proven ability for the careful planning and collaboration that the implementation demanded.

The end result wasn’t just a successful implementation, but an ongoing partnership that is all about protecting Ameren and its customers, operating with an understanding of how security issues evolve, quickly. When it comes to cyber security, “next generation” thinking is crucial.

How exactly does it work? In this case, Dell SecureWorks analysts performed an in-depth analysis of all security events across Ameren’s security infrastructure, increasing the visibility of their security profile and bolstering compliance with regulations. Risks are immediately identified and assessed, the cause is determined, and mitigation strategies are deployed before disaster strikes. Working in partnership with Ameren staff, Dell SecureWorks experts protect the company 24/7.

As the head of Cyber Security at Ameren put it, “Dell SecureWorks found many more verified events occurring than we ever saw with the previous solution…. Since we switched, we’re getting more information on alerts and threats before they turn into problems.”

And what’s the added bonus to enhanced security that Ameren has seen? Their information security costs are actually lower than they were before partnering with Dell. 

About the Author: Suresh Vaswani

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