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Acer America
Acer America Corp. is a computer manufacturer of business and consumer PCs, notebooks, ultrabooks, projectors, servers, and storage products.

Location

333 West San Carlos Street
San Jose, California 95110
United States

WWW: acer.com

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News

July 1, 2019 |

inSOC Calls Turnkey, Holistic Security its Competitive Edge

The recently launched SOC-as-a-service vendor aims to set itself apart in a crowded market by combining 24×7 SIEM services with pre-configured appliances that partners can install in as little as an hour, according to COO Kristian Wright (pictured).

Inspired by proliferating security threats, businesses worldwide will devote over $21 billion to managed security services, according to IDC. All that spending has vendors ranging from Continuum to Vijilan to Arctic Wolf and beyond introducing outsourced security operations center (SOC) solutions for MSPs. inSOC, however, thinks its recently introduced SOC-as-a-service offering has a competitive edge.

“If you look at a lot of the other managed security solutions, they’re either incomplete—they only do one thing or part of one thing—or they’re very complete and they take months to actually install,” says Eric Rockwell, inSOC’s CEO.

By contrast, he continues, inSOC’s ONE STOP SOC offering is both comprehensive and easy to adopt. The service combines 24x7x365 monitoring via an AI-based SIEM platform with automated vulnerability scanning, asset inventory management, and regulatory reporting. Equipped with plug-and-play appliances that partners can install at client sites quickly, the solution is designed to be fully operational within an hour.

“It’s a one-stop, pre-configured turnkey solution that MSPs can easily grasp and resell for a good, high margin to their client base,” says COO Kristian Wright.

The solution provides robust protection despite its simplicity, according to Rockwell. The SIEM component, for example, does deep packet inspection in addition to intrusion detection, and aggregates data from a long list of platforms. “We’re ingesting every log from Azure, AWS, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, all these different sources,” Rockwell says. “We get a very holistic picture.”

The solution stands apart as well, Wright adds, from systems that overwhelm users with alerts or flag potential problems but offer no advice on what to do about them. “We’ve tried to rework the whole solution from the ground up to get rid of those issues,” he says, noting that inSOC analysts filter out unimportant alerts before they reach users and provide remediation assistance for the alerts they do send.

“Most MSPs don’t have full-time security personnel, so they’re not going to know how to go in and try to remediate something,” says David Watts, inSOC’s CFO. “We’re going to actually teach them.”

The entire package is built around standards defined in the highly respected NIST cybersecurity framework as well as the Center for Internet Security’s top 20 list of critical security controls, Rockwell emphasizes. “We didn’t have to read through 5 billion breach reports to figure out the most common cause of a data breach for a small business. NIST and the Center for Internet Security have already done that,” he says.

inSOC offers three packages. The entry-level Essential package offers round-the-clock SOC services plus asset inventory monitoring. The Power plan adds SOC analysis and assistance, as well as vulnerability scanning. The top-of-the-line Premium package also provides reporting for HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FISMA, and other regulations.

Billing is done on a flat per-customer-site basis, rather than per device. Subscriptions come with rolling six-month contracts that buyers can opt out of with 30 days’ notice. “Typically, we’re seeing the MSPs that we’re selling to make two to three times what we’re charging on the back end, so it’s a very good margin for them to make,” Wright says.

All services are delivered white label through the MSP. inSOC personnel have no direct contact with that MSP’s customers.

inSOC’s offering is heavily informed by the experiences of its founders. Rockwell and Watts both ran large MSPs earlier in their careers. CIO Jeff Gulick, meanwhile, has served in a variety of technology, cybersecurity, and strategic planning roles for the past two decades. All three have struggled personally with what say is a shortage of truly end-to-end security solutions. “You’d buy this over here, you’d buy that over here, you’d get a SOC over here. None of them played perfectly well together,” Watts says. “We wanted to come up with a holistic approach.”

Adding simplicity to the package, according to Rockwell, allows channel pros with little managed security experience to take on more established managed security service providers. “We’re enabling MSPs to launch an MSSP program and compete head-to-head with these guys and be able to undercut them, not because it’s less value or because it’s not as good of a tool. It’s because we eliminated the complexity from the equation,” he says.

To help cybersecurity newcomers enter the market successfully, inSOC offers a 30-day onboarding program, led by Vice President of Channel Sales Hannah Lloyd, that provides both post-installation technical assistance and training in security best practices. “We will also teach the MSP how to actually conduct a NIST-based security maturity level assessment,” Rockwell says, noting that most of the company’s partners sell those engagements separately from their ongoing managed security services. “They get three to five grand for them per assessment,” he says.

ONE STOP SOC is the first of what will eventually be multiple inSOC deliverables, one of which will help MSPs draft written security policies. According to Rockwell, that’s something most businesses need and few vendors provide.

“Every regulation requires it, and no one is really doing that,” he says.


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