Today, cybersecurity teams are facing an uphill struggle, dragged down by increasing numbers of threats, skills gaps, and tool sprawl. As a result, they are forced to work like machines. This situation isn’t sustainable, it increases the risk of human error, and it results in cyber incidents that are actually avoidable.
Enter SecureAck, born out of the need to do cybersecurity differently. The developer of the cutting-edge A-Ops platform, this solution enables organisations to build limitless automations, eliminating the risks that come with working cybersecurity professionals like machines. In light of SecureAck’s success within the Southern Enterprise Awards 2024, we discover how its revolutionary work is transforming the world of cybersecurity as we know it.
SecureAck is the go-to partner for cybersecurity teams when it comes to pushing the boundaries of what they can accomplish, with its intelligent SaaS automation platform, A-Ops delivering the speed and scale needed in order to secure entire IT systems. Whether through A-Ops or its Managed Automation-as-a-Service (MAaaS), SecureAck’s specialist tailored solutions meet its clients’ unique needs, empowering them to boost their efficiency, reduce risk, and optimise their security stack with truly limitless, intelligent automations.
A-Ops is infinitely scalable with intelligent automations that maximise the efficiency of automating IT, operational technology, and infrastructure technology environments. Using A-Ops, critical security functions such as incident response can detect cyberattacks and automate patch compliance. Boasting 48-times faster incident response times, A-Ops has 100-times more power than legacy security automation, and allows complete visibility across an organisation’s entire IT estate.
An intuitive self-service platform, the platform relies on logic to build workflows, lowering the barriers to entry for automation. Then, for those customers needing additional support, SecureAck’s MAaaS can provide this at any stage, whether in setting up the initial automations, managing business-critical workflows, or delivering a fully managed service. An industry-first, this MAaaS offering allows organisations to achieve fully automated security operations that are backed by 24/7 monitoring and incident response. This comes as an automation-first solution to what would otherwise be a highly skilled and resource-heavy task, and it also significantly reduces the cost of entry, making it an affordable solution for small businesses.
SecureAck partners with a range of businesses operating in industries from retail to manufacturing to everything in between. For its smaller customers, it offers a fully managed service that allows them access to all the benefits of cybersecurity automation, but without the need to invest in an internal team. All customers are assigned technical support managers for their entire product lifecycle and the level of support has been applauded by customers, including rail industry provider, Lur, who praised SecureAck as “very professional and efficient in all my dealings with them. The customer support has been great with any questions answered quickly”.
“SecureAck and A-Ops brings limitless intelligent data driven automation to security teams who often describe A-Ops as a Swiss army knife due to its versatility. With A-Ops, you define how you want to work, and it supports you in achieving the objectives of security for your business.”
Notably, UK sportswear brand, Castore turned to A-Ops with the need to improve its security measures in a way that was budget-friendly and reliable on a long-term basis. A-Ops has since significantly improved Castore’s cybersecurity by, first of all, enabling critical use cases, including out-of-the-box integration across SaaS services to ingest log data. Using A-Ops, Castore have been able to setup and prioritise high-priority events, enhancing operational security through improved monitoring and response capabilities.
Also, Castore has found that A-Ops drives tangible results, allowing it to now run over 500 security automations monthly, streamlining processes that previously required manual intervention. The company is planning on doubling its automation usage over the next year, integrating more sophisticated workflows to handle emerging security risks. Finally, A-Ops has improved Castore’s incident response and operational resiliency, reducing the time to resolve security alerts by 40%. Castore reported that A-Ops massively reduced the time its teams have spent on repetitive security tasks, and it highlighted the platform’s ability to identify and respond to incidents quickly.
Meanwhile, SecureAck has also worked with a multinational supply chain firm headquartered in Oxford that was going through a complex cloud migration involving multiple consultants and technology platforms. During this process, network user passwords were exposed in error – comprising the integrity of accounts and leaving them at risk of exploitation. Furthermore, the cybersecurity team uncovered that those passwords impacted weren’t compliant with the company password policy.
The team needed to reset more than 3,000 passwords spanning multiple servers – which could take several weeks to months – and they needed to get users to agree to the company’s password policy and confirm compliance before they could receive their new passwords. They recognised the need for automation to complete a task of such scale and complexity in the short time required to assure the organisation’s security posture.
By utilising A-Ops, the company was able to achieve run-away speed to deployment. Within just a couple of hours of executing automation, many non-system impacting accounts had been disabled. The team spent the next two days building, testing, and deploying automated flows for policy acceptance and password resets. It took just three days to build and deploy the workflow in A-Ops.
From there, the client experienced minimised disruption, as implementing this automation meant its security teams weren’t waiting for end-users to complete steps to reset their accounts. Everything was rendered self-service with an emphasis on account owners to undertake actions. Additionally, A-Ops meant the company could scale without room for error. The drag-and-drop interface reduced the barrier to entry for automation that could be scaled for future use cases, with minimal modification and no chance of human error in the critical task of securely managing and distributing passwords.
“SecureAck allows skilled professionals to spend time working on value-add and implementing additional features, controls, and processes; meanwhile A-Ops is carrying out the mundane tasks.”
Commenting on the abilities of SecureAck and A-Ops, the company’s Founder and CTO, Simon Phillips says, “At a time when teams are stretched and security professionals are forced to work like machines to defend organisations against a ferocious threat landscape, the ability to rely on intelligent automations that always work the way they are meant to reduces security risk and alleviates the pressure of defending against a highly volatile cybersecurity landscape. This is while the ability to integrate the entire security stack and negate the need for some bigger ticket purchases enables security leaders to meet the pressure to “do more with less” in a challenging economic environment.”
Over the last 12 months, A-Ops has boasted 100% availability – meaning no downtime for any customers – and it is being used to run a staggering 115,000 automations each day, which totals at 3.5 million a month. Alongside this, 60% of SecureAck’s customers are benefiting from its MAaaS offering to enhance the potential of the platform. This isn’t all that makes the company stand out, for it also prides itself on the quality of its SLAs, which outperform industry competitors on metrics such as platform availability.
Indeed, SecureAck’s offering is nothing short of exceptional – and at its foundation is of course its expert team and an internal culture that encourages learning and collaboration. Cybersecurity is a highly skilled profession, and it is an industry that is moving at such a rapid pace that it can be challenging to keep abreast with, but SecureAck nurtures a team environment that makes this possible. Consequently, its people can create and maintain such brilliant, technologically advanced solutions that its customers know they can completely rely on them.
Looking ahead, the future is looking incredibly bright for SecureAck as it continues building innovative integrations within A-Ops to deliver core security functionalities at a fraction of the cost. An integration with AWS OpenSearch, for example, lets security teams carry out SIEM-like functions and negates the need for a costly investment in a dedicated SIEM solution. Additionally, SecureAck has expansion on the cards, with plans to branch out to North America, as Simon shares, “We are confident in SecureAck’s ability to penetrate the market, given its watertight SLAs, fast ROI, and simple integrations with popular enterprise apps and services to maintain the standards that have underpinned its rapid growth to date.”
For business enquiries, contact Simon Phillips from SecureAck via email – [email protected] or on their website – www.secureack.com
