Due to the daily changes in the field of technology and cybersecurity, Constantinos Stylianou, Marketing and PR Manager, GCC and Sotiris Ioannou, Head of Spectrum, are presenting in a joint interview, Spectrum, the new Managed Security Services Provider arm (MSSP) of GCC, as well as how businesses can benefit from its services.
Mr. Constantinos Stylianou: In this digital age organisations rely heavily on IT. The rapid growth of cybercrime, the dramatic cost increase of cyberattacks, the fast evolving and high churn of cybersecurity tech, limited budgets and the global cybersecurity skill gap faced by organizations led us to the creation of Spectrum, GCC’s Managed Security Service Provider arm (MSSP). Spectrum offers comprehensive solutions for the complete management of cybersecurity.
What are managed security services and how Spectrum correlates to that?
Mr. Constantinos Stylianou: By definition, managed security services allow a business to offload security operations to Spectrum. Spectrum assumes the watch guard role providing comprehensive centralised monitoring and analysis of suspicious activity throughout the organisation’s IT infrastructure. Spectrum helps organisations gain visibility, respond to advance threats, provide improved ROI while at the same time address the cybersecurity skill gap and improves security posture.
How can modern, growing businesses leverage them to become more efficient and secure?
Mr. Constantinos Stylianou: Organizations benefit from risk, cost and complexity reduction by entrusting the management and monitoring of their security to an experienced service provider. By taking over Spectrum security services business people can do what they do best, which is driving their business forward.
Spectrum services meet the needs of any business, regardless of their business activity, including education, financial, public, manufacturing, maritime, power and utilities, retail, telecommunications and others by making the shift from internal IT departments to managed security services.
Why do modern businesses need managed security services?
Mr. Constantinos Stylianou: Spectrum services help you to prevent and proactively prepare for, rather than react to, security incidents. So, instead of minor issues going unnoticed or building up to a business-disrupting problem, proactive monitoring and management minimizes the risk that you’ll lose time and money to an unexpected IT nightmare. Also, compliance and regulatory authorities require businesses to be secured and have internally processes which protect their business. By losing credibility will cause reputational damage and by losing time due to downtime means losing money and productivity.
What we need to know about existing time response and troubleshooting issues and how does Spectrum handles it?
Mr. Sotiris Ioannou: Downtime due to security problems can create a domino-like effect on productivity throughout your entire organization. When your employees can’t access the tools they need to do their jobs — and your customers can’t access your website or applications — no one is happy.
Spectrum has the ability to monitor, identify, and rectify problems before they even happen, hence minimising the impact of an attack.
Are Spectrum security services cost-effective for businesses?
Mr. Sotiris Ioannou: Working with Spectrum team is incredibly valuable because you can get access to the experience and expertise you need immediately at a fraction of the cost. This increases scalability and prevents you from having to pay for additional infrastructure or hardware you aren’t using.
Using Spectrum managed security services proves cost-effective for businesses because it provides a high level of IT support and assistance at a cost that is lower than if the business were to try and recreate that service in-house. Also, Spectrum reduces any hidden costs, like employees mandatory training to keep them up to date with the latest numerous technologies, the pressure to retain them, promote them and the cost of administrating multiple security platforms.
How does Spectrum help business executives?
Mr. Sotiris Ioannou: Currently the IT industry is going through a race between attacks and tools to protect the IT environment. This race has caused an explosion of new security tools while at the same time has shortened the life cycle and the limitations of these tools.
Businesses are faced with more intense and frequent training of IT teams, rushed to gain expertise and finally implement and utilise the tools appropriately. Given the intensity and intelligence in modern attacks the holistic security implementation for an organisation is set to rise exponentially.
Maintaining high performance and at the same time fostering innovation and supporting business development, seems like an impossible task. On top of that, budget constraints and lack of specialized skills and human capital is putting even more stress on any IT team, no matter how big or small your company is.
Business executives need to be aware of the threats, and how their business assets are exposed to those threats. In a case of an unexpected attack, this will dramatically affect the business in terms of money losses/fines, reputational damage. And mainly, how do you cost the downtime and the idle resources till you resolve an attack.
Spectrum offers security teams the tools, knowledge, infrastructure and flexibility they need, to keep their mind focused on creating value for your business and your customers.
How does Spectrum improves business cybersecurity issues?
Mr. Sotiris Ioannou: Implementing strong security solutions and maintaining an appropriate security posture requires expertise and a multitude of complex technologies. The in-house IT department is tasked with keeping the business running adding on top management, monitoring and operation of your security posture is a herculean task not easily achieved. With Spectrum an expert team provides the same level of quality of an in-house house team allowing organisations to increase their efficiency, productivity and the in-house IT team to deliver on their core values.
The global skill gap in cybersecurity exacerbates the issue. Therefore, hiring the required level of expertise is an almost impossible task and, in most situations, a non-viable solution for many organisations due to increased costs. With Spectrum, organisations pay only for the services they need, while our team acts as an extension of your internal IT team providing enhancement, management, monitoring and response to threats.
As your teams go home for the day cybercriminals are getting to work, protecting your infrastructure is a 24-hour requirement. Spectrum provides round-the-clock monitoring and active defence of your infrastructure and dealing with emerging issues keeping your business on-track.
Spectrum provides broad visibility and real-time control across today’s increasingly complex and ever-evolving network by reducing complexity. Spectrum is using advanced analytics, threat correlation, dynamic adaptability and integrated threat response combined with broad deployability, deep integration between security tools, the network and dynamic automation. Those are the functions which make Spectrum a security platform that is capable of defending today’s dynamic networks and connected ecosystems.
Finally, Spectrum tools and services can help your company identify vulnerabilities and provide risk scoring of your current security posture, allowing you to make the correct decisions and arming you with the correct tools and expertise for the battle against cybercrime.
For more information, visit the Spectrum website: https://www.gcc.com.cy/spectrum/
