Not every organization is – or even wants to be – a Fortune 500. Unfortunately, cybercriminals don’t care how big your company is. In fact, they often look to target small and midsize businesses (SMBs) knowing that they might have fewer security resources. You have the same problems that the big companies have, but you also have less money and people. Using centralized log management can give you the security solution you need, at a price you can afford.
AIN’T TOO SMALL TO ATTACK
The reality is: cybercriminals just want money. We call data an “asset” because it can be monetized by both businesses and cybercriminals.
According to the 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report, cybercriminals are treating SMBs and large enterprise organizations the same. The report noted that while SMB breaches were less than half the amount of enterprise breaches in 2020, 2021 showed a closing gap, sharing:
- SMBs had 263 breaches while enterprise had 307
- Top attack patterns were the same
- Money was the top motivation for both
If cybercriminals want money, they don’t care where it comes from. SMBs may want to curl up and turn into a digital burrito, but they don’t really have that option.
BIG SECURITY PROBLEMS
SMBs have the same big security problems the enterprise faces. While their infrastructures and employee numbers may be smaller, they also have fewer people working on security and less money. In the end, they end up with mostly the same story.
CLOUD FOR ALL
Cloud adoption poses the same problems for everyone. Connected ecosystems lead to visibility issues, and complexity makes managing access a challenge.
Smaller IT teams traditionally focused on firewalls to secure networks. It was easy to require employees to work in the office. The pandemic stay-at-home orders changed that. Now people want to work from anywhere, no matter where they’re employed.
For small teams, managing credential theft attacks can be challenging. A password reset, on its own, doesn’t always lead to an escalation. After all, people forget their passwords all the time. Without visibility into the device being used or where the most recent login attempt came from, the IT team has no idea that this is an anomaly or attempted attack.
RANSOMWARE IS EVERYWHERE
Cybercriminals don’t sit at computers coding endlessly. Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) takes the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model and applies it to criminal activity.
This means that cybercriminals don’t need to be computer masterminds. This increases the number of cybercriminals deploying attacks and the number of attacks.
With employees working remotely, a small team might struggle to enforce security update installation. Further, if an employee is using their own device, then you may have even less control.
MEETING THE MANDATES
The news of data breaches and ransomware attacks leads to more privacy and security laws. This means that small teams not only have to secure new locations and protect against new attack types, but they need to document everything they’re doing.
This stretches teams even thinner than they were already stretched.
CENTRALIZED LOG MANAGEMENT: EMPOWERING SMALL TEAMS TO SOLVE THEIR BIG TECHNOLOGY PROBLEMS
Small IT teams need solutions that can solve all their problems, not just the ones that are making headlines. Centralized log management solutions can do the double duty necessary to solve traditional IT problems and enhance security.
DO MORE WITH LESS
Small teams and SMBs are used to finding creative ways to solve their problems. They know how to find a good bargain for things like office furniture and workstation devices.
Centralized log management is the good bargain for smaller teams that need to solve multiple problems while staying within a budget. The right centralized log management solution can help small IT teams:
- Detect potential security incidents
- identify service issues
- Evaluate resource usage
Instead of buying different tools for each function, small IT teams can optimize their centralized log management solution to handle IT operations and security needs.
WORK SMARTER, NOT HARDER
Everyone is suffering from burnout these days. Small IT teams need a way to work smarter, not harder. This means that they need to make sure that they’re focusing on the highest priority issues at all times.
Since centralized log management brings together all data from across the environment, teams can create high fidelity alerts. This means that teams can reduce the number of false alerts that take up valuable time.
Automating redundant tasks, like sending people the compliance reports they need, also gives you a way to work smarter. Compliance is becoming more important to organizations of all sizes, across all industries. For small IT teams, it feels like one more burden placed on their time. By automating and scheduling reporting, you can reduce the time spent gathering audit documentation and meet business-critical compliance requirements.
MANAGE RESOURCES EFFICIENTLY
IT teams understand how to manage resources when it comes to answering help desk questions. They know how to triage requests so that they get the right people managing the right requests.
Security can work the same way. You don’t need to have a single person dedicated to security, sitting around waiting for an alert to trigger or looking for anomalous activity.
A centralized log management solution that offers an intuitive interface can give you the right resource to empower the right people. Not everyone needs to be a security expert. If you can create queries easily, you can do proactive threat hunting. Then, if you can schedule the queries to run regularly, you can enhance your security further.
Integrating your centralized log management solution with your current workflows gives you a way to build security directly into your pre-existing processes. If your current processes know when to escalate help desk tickets, then you can build out the same processes for security.
All of this makes managing resources easier for small teams so that they can efficiently and effectively respond to security issues.
GRAYLOG: THE BIG SOLUTION FOR SMALL IT TEAMS
Graylog Cloud delivers centralized log management as a SaaS solution. Small IT teams can optimize their budgets by using Graylog for both their security and operations needs, getting a “two for one” solution. Additionally, with Graylog, you can schedule the compliance reports you need to provide, eliminating repetitive tasks and increasing productivity.
Graylog was purpose built to make log management accessible to everyone on the IT team. We made our queries easy to write, without requiring specialized skills or coding. Small security and IT teams can easily investigate alerts without having to leave the platform by clicking on data points to trace activity.
Graylog Illuminate makes it easy to set up your instance by providing content packs that help define normalization and parsing rules. For smaller teams, this eliminates the time-consuming processes that people associate with setting up a log management solution.
For more information about how Graylog can help your team streamline operations and enhance security contact us today.
