The Birth of UNIFY
By Majid Ahmed Khan, Director Service Design and Architecture, Help AG
In the pursuit of excellence as the region’s biggest MSSP player, Help AG has recently launched the UNIFY platform bringing in service centric business evolution – version 3.0. We have been ideating on the need for a platform to solve the complexity involved in handling diverse security technologies in an enterprise environment or for a MSSP.
In this article, we delve deeper to find out what led to the birth of UNIFY, the value it brings to our customers, and what we can expect out of it in months and years to come.
Typically, an enterprise environment consists of 20-30 different security technologies. These technologies are not only the touchpoints for preventing an attack, but also actively assist in detection, providing context or facilitating remediation when things go wrong. For an MSSP managing multiple such customers, this challenge becomes multi-fold as we now have n (number of customers) times these diverse technologies to look at while responding to an attack.
Moreover, these challenges are compounded by the complexities inherent in running a Cyber Defense Center. Without adequately addressing these issues, service providers often find themselves facing some of the issues as mentioned below:
- Not having enough time to look at all the alerts.
- Struggling to gather comprehensive context about artifacts to intelligently analyze the incident.
- Inconsistency during incident handling due to varying skills levels.
- Interaction with too many technologies for enrichment or response.
- Ineffective collaboration with asset owners, customers and / or other stakeholders.
- Lacking the agility to develop additional services to tackle new threats or achieve outcome driven capabilities.
In search of answers to these challenges, we were looking for a solution that would allow the following outcomes.
- Our analysts to interact with multiple technologies through a single interface to enrich, get context or take intelligent response actions.
- A consistent mechanism to guide analysts during incident investigation and response.
- Our customers to not just have a view of the service, but also a mechanism to collaborate with our teams to exchange information.
- Customers to have an option for an outcome driven service, rather than having to buy a product.
- Our team to be able to swiftly develop new capabilities based on newer threats, compliance requirements, or the business requirements of our customers.
In response to the challenges, we encountered and the desired outcomes we aimed to achieve, we actively developed a platform that we now refer to as UNIFY.
“Today, the UNIFY platform stands at the heart of our cyber defense services. It not only powers our current offerings, but also enables us to develop and launch new services.”
As the same suggests, it does UNIFY and provide our customers with the following key capabilities.
- Unification – Consolidate best-in-class security stack with Help AG’s industry-leading people and processes
- Collaboration – A robust cloud platform, hosted locally, enabling omni-channel collaboration between customer and Help AG’s experts to elevate customer experience
- Visibility – Provides security teams with attack visibility, threat intelligence and intelligent analysis that is necessary for protecting assets and eradicating threats as they arise
- Intelligent Automation – Improves incident accuracy, response time and actions with embedded and integrated Security Orchestration and Automation
- Quicker Time to Value – In-country cloud, offered as embedded SOAR as part of every MDR offering
- Pay Per Use - Charges only for outcome driven capabilities (like automated response or active collaboration)
Today, the UNIFY platform stands at the heart of our cyber defense services. It not only powers our current offerings, but also enables us to develop and launch new services utilizing the capabilities of the platform.
Stay tuned and keep an eye on this space as we unleash the full potential of UNIFY!
