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Staying Ahead of the Game

By Dennis Charlebois, VP, Product Operations, Hexis Cyber Solutions

More often than not, cybersecurity stories come to light only when things take a turn for the
worse. You name it, it’s happened: personal information – stolen, private emails – intercepted,
systems – disrupted. And that’s just a sample since the beginning of 2015. Major brand
reputations tarnished by a flawed cybersecurity plan are front page stories we too often see.
Rarely do we see a story about an organization that, in advance, took proper precautions by
crafting a comprehensive cybersecurity plan that effectively defends against and deals with a
potential network breach.

In an effort to highlight success, the following is a story of a government municipality that
worked through a major IT project and implemented a cybersecurity plan as a means of
improving operational efficiency, but also found additional benefits in protecting their information
assets.

The government municipality illustrated in this scenario was in need of an IT update. As the CIO
began to further analyze his department’s security posture, he caught a glaring issue. The
municipality lacked the technology, the employee skillsets and the sheer number of employees
who would be needed to effectively mitigate a possible security breach. An industry-wide global
cybersecurity skills shortage created a big problem; high-end digital and cyber forensic analysts
were very expensive and very difficult to find. The CIO also realized that, in addition to people,
the right technology was needed to detect and analyze but surgically remove advanced
malware and threats. The CIO was faced with a time-consuming and costly issue.

Cyber threats have not only become much more visible to the general public, but also are more
frequent and more severe in their potential impact on an unsuspecting organization. Following
an attack, time is of the essence. The longer an organization takes to remediate and remove the
threat, the higher the chance of rapid widespread infection, and potential loss of data. To
address compliance and audit requirements, the CIO decided they needed to implement an
enterprise-wide solution that would better manage and analyze data so that they could
proactively take immediate action with the limited resources they had.

His IT team decided to implement a cybersecurity solution that was able to detect, engage and
automatically remove advanced cyber threats as part of its strategic security objective and five
year plan to more concrete cybersecurity initiatives. By deploying an automated solution that
continuously detects and removes network threats, the team eliminated the need to perform this
work manually, which is critical yet time consuming, saving both time and costs of incident
response.

Through this implementation, the government agency has increased operational efficiency while
greatly improving the protection of personal information of their constituents and stakeholders.
This security platform will further drive innovation with the ability to deploy advanced solutions
for the greater good of the organization.

60 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – March 2015 Edition
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