Managed security services provider RSM US has announced that the company has begun to leverage Stellar Cyber’s open extended detection and response (“Open XDR”) platform to simplify the way it delivers cybersecurity coverage for its customers. By partnering with Stellar Cyber and integrating its technology, the RSM team has found it can better unify and manage the band of cybersecurity defenses it employs to protect customers through its global MSSP client network.
Stellar Cyber is the company behind a novel Open XDR platform, which gives organizations the freedom and flexibility to integrate data signals from their preferred security tools into a dedicated dashboard and analysis platform.
This is especially important given that the typical organization these days uses dozens of security and infrastructure tools that generate logs, telemetry data, and alerts, which can warn security teams of an impending attack. With so many different security data sources in use, all generating endless streams of information, organizations need a simple way to integrate and unify those signals and to know when action is required.
This is where Stellar Cyber comes in, providing extensive capabilities found in next-generation SIEM and SOAR products, directly within the Open XDR platform and managed with a single license. Organizations can thus consolidate all of their security mechanisms into a single platform, eliminating the growing fragmentation of traditional cybersecurity stacks. Stellar Cyber is built to address the demand for leaner enterprise security teams, with an open approach that ensures its platform can work with any third-party data source.
Stellar Cyber has already enjoyed considerable success, boasting customers and partners across Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa, and the company claims to help protect more than three million IT assets globally. Stellar’s success means that it quickly came to the attention of RSM US, a leading MSSP client network in North America.
One of the world’s largest managed services providers, RSM US operates a global security operations service called RSM Defense, providing around-the-clock threat detection, response and intelligence services to its customers. However, as RSM Defense has built out its capabilities in response to the constantly evolving nature of cybersecurity threats, its workflows have become significantly more complex.
RSM Defense Director and Threat Operations leader Todd Willoughby said he and his team have slowly but surely amassed a large number of disparate client data sources, each one with its own console and focused on a specific area of cybersecurity. The advantage of having so many client data sources is that it can help his team to identify more advanced security threats – and to do so faster. But to do that, diverse, cross-channel data must be correlated to provide additional context. Only then can the source of those threats be identified.
Having heard what Stellar Cyber could do, Willoughby was keen to see for himself. “Stellar Cyber is taking a different approach to what’s been offered in the market over the last 15 years,” Willoughby said in a statement. “Instead of just putting out another SIEM, they are addressing the challenge of delivering a complete view of security events across our clients’ infrastructure under one pane of glass.”
In contrast to many other companies, which offer “black box” XDR platforms that integrate their own EDRs, firewalls and security products, Stellar Cyber gives customers the freedom to integrate any tool, ingesting the data they generate and automatically correlating it with the data it collects from other tools. This provides the necessary context for RSM Defense to quickly reveal the source of multi-vector attacks and security risks. Stellar Cyber goes further, too, as its ML engines can also suggest responses to each threat it identifies.
Willoughby hailed the benefits of this approach, which not only makes it simpler to identify and deal with security threats, but also allows companies to preserve the substantial investments – such as training and licenses – they have made in the existing products they use. “Because it’s an open platform, Stellar Cyber allows RSM Defense to continue using our clients’ new or existing EDRs and other security stack tools,” he said.
Another advantage of Stellar Cyber is its ease of use. The platform automates much of the work involved in security detection and response, meaning it can be used with minimal effort. As such, RSM Defense now finds it much easier to recruit and train the staff it needs to uphold its rigorous security standards.
This is a considerable benefit, Willoughby said, because many companies are simply unable to find the security talent they need to protect their businesses adequately. “Finding great senior cybersecurity analysts is tough – even if you can find one, they can cost the business $150,000 plus a year, and most companies can’t afford that,” he pointed out. “Stellar Cyber is one of the few cybersecurity vendors trying to address the worldwide talent shortage and high personnel costs.”
The team at RSM has said that since adopting Stellar Cyber’s Open XDR platform, it has been able to provide superior security protections for its customers, identifying what is happening on its client networks and responding to incidents far more rapidly than before.
Stellar Cyber’s senior Vice President of Marketing Steve Garrison said MSSPs have been crying out for a superior solution that enables them to carry out automatic data correlation and analysis through a single interface. According to Garrison, “Our platform delivers on those promises like no other solution in the market.”
