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New cyber threats emerge every day, and they continue to grow more diverse and sophisticated. IT teams face the constant challenge of addressing that full range of potential attacks, straining resources as new capabilities and requirements emerge. The challenge is especially acute for smaller companies that lack the large security teams typical in enterprises.
Those realities can bog down the business as a whole, interfering with their ability to innovate and seize opportunities. In fact, 40 percent of medium businesses experienced eight hours or more of system downtime because of a severe security breach within a one-year period.1 Those outages equate to lost productivity, damaged reputations, and financial losses that the business can ill afford.
And it’s no wonder; it’s tremendously difficult to guard against the variety of threats arrayed against every organization. Targeted attacks such as spear-phishing against employees combine with advanced persistent threats, ransomware, distributed denial-of-service attacks, and many others. All this exists against the backdrop of ongoing assaults by conventional malware.
One contributor to the problem is that collections of point security solutions have grown organically over the years, as new needs arise. Managing them all can easily become untenable, even as overlap and gaps between them compromise the very protections they are intended to provide. The solution is to unify those ineffective, inefficient collections of point solutions to deliver dependable protection based on a holistic security vision.
Drive Complexity Out of Security Postures
The first order of business is to assess and catalog the security policies and tools that are currently in place. Many businesses are alarmed when they discover just how complex their systems of security measures are and by the inefficiency associated with managing them. By working with a qualified partner to consider those collections of point solutions as a whole, the organization can begin to see how their functionality could be unified under a centralized, end-to-end vision.
Likewise, a more holistic approach can help overcome the resource issues that plague mid-market businesses. After all, these companies often feel as though they are drowning in security alerts, of which they are able to investigate just 55.6 percent,1 leaving them vulnerable to an enormous number of threats they are unable to act on. Bolstering internal resources with partner services and expertise is a ready path to overcoming that weakness.
Another critical benefit of working with a qualified end-to-end security partner is that it fosters ongoing improvements to security posture as new threats and the means to defend against them emerge. Instead of bolting on new point security solutions, a constantly evolving, holistic solution steadily becomes more sophisticated and capable. And responsibility for continuous improvement of security posture is shared with the security solution provider.
Extend Protection as the Business Grows and Its Needs Change
Mid-market businesses in particular must cope with security needs that become more complex as the organization grows. Larger user bases must be protected, collaboration and integration with customers and partners increases, and the internal environment itself becomes more complex. As those developments proceed, security must enable innovation, rather than slowing it down.
Internal security organizations typically face growing pains because of these changes. Unfamiliar scale and complexity can create confusion and cause missteps in terms of guarding the business. Those errors can and will be exploited by the armies of attackers already at the gates, and the only alternative may seem to be slowing down growth initiatives in the name of safety. And slowing down the pace of business is a losing proposition.
While the new vistas of growth and complexity may be new territory to internal security organizations, they are familiar ground to a security partner already accustomed to working with businesses of all types and sizes. In particular, Dell Technologies maintains a security practice specifically tailored to the needs of mid-market businesses. Instead of struggling to catch up with new business and security requirements, this partnership provides an established set of services and expertise to protect the business today and grow with it into the future.
End-to-End, Holistic Security with Dell Technologies
Every medium business needs a partner it can rely on to help it optimally implement and maintain security, no matter what the future brings. Dell Technologies offers more than tools and services alone. Partnering with Dell Technologies affords mid-market businesses an end-to-end security solution that protects from endpoint to data center to cloud. It also supplies the vision to continually evolve and improve security posture as time goes on and businesses evolve.
Dell Technologies offers a comprehensive, three-pronged approach: trusted devices, trusted infrastructure, and trusted data. Each plays a distinct role in the Dell Technologies vision for end-to-end security. Together, they offer future-proofed security in depth while also helping alleviate the strain on scarce internal resources, bolstering the organization’s ability to keep its guard up.
- Trusted devices begin with the world’s most secure commercial PC,2 with features built in such as multi-factor authentication and hardware-based credential storage, as well as BIOS-level protections that establish security from the start.
- Trusted infrastructure provides an ironclad, cyber-resistant environment designed to protect servers, storage, and appliances from the BIOS to the cloud and evolve with the business, securing the entire datacenter – even in the cloud.
- Trusted data delivers protected, controlled, and monitored data security, helping to ensure data is protected at rest and in motion – even when it passes outside the firewall – to safeguard sensitive information however it is used.
Building on this industry-leading set of components, Dell Technologies provides the expertise and guidance that enable mid-market businesses to implement comprehensive security postures.
Conclusion
In place of security mechanisms bolted together piecemeal from point solutions, Dell Technologies partners with mid-market businesses to provide holistic protection. Robust security protects businesses as they build out their computing environments, from their first data center to their adoption of new capabilities such as hybrid cloud.
With Dell Technologies as a partner, businesses can maintain world-class protection against cyber threats, even in the face of constant internal and external change.
Learn more about scalable security solutions for the mid-market from Dell Technologies at DellTechnologies.com/Mid-Market.
1 2018 Cisco Cybersecurity Report, “Small and Mighty: How Small and Midmarket Businesses Can Fortify Their Defenses Against Today’s Threats.” https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/security/small-mighty-threat.pdf
2 Based on Dell Internal Analysis, November 2017.